Atleast with PPC the chance of pirating the OS is smaller.
Shame on you. Amigans, of all people, should understand how harmful hardware locking and copy protection is to any platform. I know you're talking specifically about the CPU, here, but the neverending quest to crack down on piracy has usually just screwed over paying customers. Choosing a CPU based on piracy concerns is stupid, compared to performance, value, and flexibility.
The Amiga has always had the worst copy protection of any computer I've ever used, to the point where the software wouldn't even work -- and it only got worse and worse as people figured out new, clever ways to hack the hardware.
Even after buying originals, I got cracked versions of all my games because half the time the originals went bad and / or made me type in stupid codes from blood-red manuals.
Do you know how many A500 games don't work on the 1200 *just* because of the stupid things done with the disk code?
How do you feel when you buy a new PC game on a CD, put it in the drive, and the game refuses to boot? How do you feel when the publishers blame your hardware and say there's nothing they can do, while getting a NoCD crack instantly fixes the problem? It's the dependency on the copy protection built into your CD-ROM that causes the problems, and the developers don't want you to know WHY the game refuses to boot, so you get no error messages.
Macs have this problem, too. I had several issues where Macintoshes with Sony CD-ROMs used software just fine, but Macs with Toshiba drives croaked. Even though all the Macs were officially built by Apple, there were still branding complications. Updates to MacOS (such as the 8.1 patch) sometimes solved the problem, but there were many issues I couldn't resolve short of replacing the CD-ROMs or downloading a new patch for an application, hoping the developers would "silently" fix a copy protection compatibility issue.
Like it or not, turning hardware into software is the future of computing. Ten years from now, the idea of running software on only one CPU will be insane. Are people learning anything from Linux and Java?
I also agree that Microsoft USED piracy to get in place everywhere, which is why they're pushing so hard to clamp down on it now. Now that they "have you where they want you", they want the money you "owe them".
I don't quite see why as 95% of computers are pre-built machines with Windows pre-installed, and therefore Microsoft gets their money even if the computers sit on shelves collecting dust.
Note that Windows has HUGE restrictions on what you can do to a system that has nothing to do with piracy, such as being unable to access files on an NTFS hard drive partition from the Windows boot CD without owning an enterprise WinPE license. You can access all the OS files, but not your PERSONAL files. If anyone knows how to read files from the recovery console, please let me know. And, no, turning on "access to all drives and folders" in your Local Security Policy does not do it.
Personally, I just think Microsoft marketeers are full of you-know-what because they just have so much power. Everyone knows that bosses don't make decisions based on logic.
