No doubt.
With the way the things are going big companies are looking at the home market and want to turn it into another advertisement-driven comsumer medium like cable television.
Except that it's going to be "interactive".
With the stuff like "trust-based" computing with MS the media authors are going to be able to allow you to download the music from there website, but restrict what you can do with it thru encryption and tying it into the hardware.
We can see some of the first examples of this by what we hear in the latest news. The self-destructing e-mail stuff. If you set it up with special MS products you can e-mail and send documentation over computers. You can specify who is allowed to receive it, how long they can look at it, and weither or not they can copy it, etc etc. Of course the record of it will be there, but it would be unreadable due to the encoding and that sort of stuff. I suppose they will tie into auto-deletion.
This then ties into the database design of the future longhorn OS. It's just how it orginizes stuff. With technology like that and a sufficently high-speed internet connections you don't even have to store stuff on your own hardware. You could simply subscribe to online secure services that would take care of protecting your information from hackers and corruption.
You could work around issues like multiple copies of songs for backups and listening at home, work, and in your car. Instead of having 4 copies, you'd just have one on a online music server (for instance) and now they can "trust" you not to use it on any hardware that is not registered to you, because the hardware itself won't allow it.
It's not HUGE deal, exept in contries like China, and places in the Middle East were they actively ban large amounts of the internet from people and block access from the router levels were the internet enters their country.
You'd essencially have a computer that has: Click here to play games, Click here to share files with your friends, Click here to play media, Click here surf the net, Click here to make art, Click here to see your online MS-Credits(tm) etc etc. What else do you need to use a computer for? No need to worry about protocols or codecs or crap like that. No need to worry about updating your OS or protective firewalls and viruses. Your OS will be tightly controlled and integrated with online servers and experts will configure firewalls and keep stuff updated on a massive scale. With annual/monthly fees of course.
Be a lot like Everquest, were you pay the monthly stuff and they set it up so that your software is always up to date. Only it would include the hardware, too, since the OS would be tied directly into it. With out the specific OS, the hardware won't function, without the specific hardware the OS won't function.
Much like how XP activation is tied into hardware, right now, exept it would be from the factory-only.
Much like buying a Xbox, exept that it would be a total multimedia solution. Other companies like Sony are working on similar stuff, too.
Also like trust-based relationships between PDC and secondary controllers in W2k server relationships.
I suppose this has very little to do with the security improvements in the x86-64 hardware, but it is along the same lines of hardware trust-based initiatives.
