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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: d[-_-]b who wrote (71934)	1/23/1999 11:16:00 PM
From: grok	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 186894

I think that there are many possible uses of the serial number and up toward the top of the list would be copy protection of software. So if you want the latest 3D game you go to a website, give them your credit card number, and your Pentium III sends them its serial number which gets embedded somewhere in the middle of the executeable that they send you back. That executeable will now only run on your PC. That's pretty straight forward so far. But it gets interesting if you ask what happens if you have an earlier Pentium or even more interesting if you have and K6 or other non-Intel processor. To make a long story short I predict that Intel has a hook that allows the software to run on Pentium I or II but not on any competitor's CPU and that software vendors who want to take advantage of the copy protection of PIII will have to use this hook. As time goes by and PIII becomes very widely used this will be a very significant competitive advantage for Intel. Also, Intel will have some kind of legal protection on the hook that makes it difficult for AMD, etc to follow them.