Slashdot Mirror
Longhorn to Require Monitor-Based DRM
Mr_Silver writes "Engadget has an interesting article regarding a new feature in Longhorn entitled PVP-OPM (Protected Video Path - Output Protection Management) which detects the capabilities of the display devices you are using and manages how (and if at all) content is sent to it. In short, this means that if Longhorn detects that your monitor is not "secure" enough, then your premium video content won't play on it until you buy one that is. Who gets to decide? The content providers of course." From the article: "So what will happen when you try to play premium content on your incompatible monitor? If you're "lucky", the content will go through a resolution constrictor. The purpose of this constrictor is to down-sample high-resolution content to below a certain number of pixels. The newly down-sampled content is then blown back up to match the resolution of your monitor. This is much like when you shrink a JPEG and then zoom into it. Much of the clarity is lost. The result is a picture far fuzzier than it need be."
As we live in a capitalistic society this of course means the end of Microsoft as an os providor as people generally don't want to buy crap (tm). I mean who would "want" to buy this?! I hope Linux is ready for the desktop (at least for Joe SP) when this rolls out because this is THE chance for linux to explode into the market.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
As ever, this won't stop anyone serious about circumventing DRM, and will only fuck over the innocent. Do they never learn?
ok, now most security measures i can at least objectively see where they're coming from, but what is this supposed to gain for anyone?
Microsoft is considering the acquisition of an ASCII art company.
This is just the feature I've been waiting for. I wouldn't dream of buying a monitor without this priceless capability.
Daniel
Carpe Diem
Its interesting to see that Microsoft and DRM technology providers are now taking a leaf out of Slashdot's book.
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
Support or no support, I don't care.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
My Computer -> Computer
My Documents -> Documents
My Monitor -> Our Monitor!
Seriously, who didn't see this coming?
By the time Longhorn is ready to ship, we won't be using monitors. The images will be beamed directly into our brains!
- AMW
isn't this a case of indirect industrial price-fixing? by forcing you to buy a DRM-enabled monitor, they can easily collude and charge a, say, 20% premium, over a standard LCD.
Another reason why Tiger and Leopard makes Longhorn look long-in-the-tooth ^^
Let the industry keep tightening the rope that will eventually hang it. I'm will not even *consider* using a system, or purchasing anything that relies on DRM- especially from Microsoft and *AA. Ultimately, the most secure DRM in the world won't mean squat if nobody supports the products that use it. Boot that, Microsoft.
It doesn't matter. Dumb people would still buy Longhorn anyway.
Or maybe would it finally pursuade people to migrate onto Mac? (I don't dare to say "linux" yet).
A Longhorn feature that everyone hopes is vaporware!
The problem is not things that *CAN* operate with a wide variety of DRM option. The abilty to support DRM isn't a problem at all.
:)
The solution, as always, is simple. Vote with your wallet for either (a) DRM solutions that make sense, or (b) for solutions that don't take advantage of the richly enabled DRM fabic available to content producers.
If I produce content, I should be able to decide what's done with it (for a reasonable time, anyway). If I want it to be one-peek-per-customer, that's my right, it's my content.
You...just shouldn't be stupid as to buy it
Another brilliant bit of marketing!
-All that is gold does not glitter - Tolkien
www.ra
Say goodbye to sending a signal to your livingroom TV, LH users.
Wow, I wasn't thinking of buying LongHorn. I mean, all those features they tore out was really kind of a bummer.
But dayamn, I have to have that feature!
Nice to see Microsoft finally give me a positive reason to buy LongHorn. Now I can't wait for LongHorn!
Can Microsoft innovate or what?
I, for one, am shocked that Microsoft would build in DRM. I mean, what kind of world are we living in where corporations control our media? Oh wait, Earth.
CC Licensed Serialized Story and Podcast: Ingenioustries
Guys, I don't think you really understand the "choices" being offered.
Company's who wish to provide Hi-Def content to PCs won't want to do it if it gets stolen/copied easily. With a secure copy-protection mechanism, far more companies will be willing to offer content.
This will create a large marketplace with lots of competition because it won't be just the big companies that can swallow the piracy loss entering the market.
So your choice isn't really between viewing this hi-def content as you wish or viewing it on a secure setup. It's a choice between content or no content.
Wouldn't you rather have at least the option of content that you wouldn't normally have?
So please, stop crying that Microsoft is out to get you and that they're infringing on some rights you think you have. Since when did the consumer of a service have the right to dictate how the company in question provides the service? You either use the service, or you don't... if it sucks and nobody uses it, the company will change the service or go out of business. Simple as that.
Microsoft will be creating MORE opportunities for services and products that can't really exist without their technology.
Two things: 1. This is not a feature. A feature is something that increases the functionality of software. 2. Features are not good things. I would much rather have feature-less software that was bug-free than buggy software with the latest bells and whistles.
Perhaps now is the perfect time for Google OS...
Mods: Do you disagree with me? Go ahead and mod me down. Meta-mods will sort it out. Good luck!
monitor monitors YOU!
Does Longhorn do away with "Save", and especially "Save As..." features? That's the end-run, around our using our own computers to work with our own info, that I've been waiting for Microsoft to "innovate" for a decade. Since Windows 95, with Gates actually putting "My Computer" stamps on our computers, I've been expecting to have to call Redmond to get permission to keep anything for "myself".
--
make install -not war
To never upgrade to Longhorn. Put that Longhorn where the sun don't shine, Mr. Bill.
And if you're *really* unlucky, they use aalib
"Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge"
- Charles Darwin
Don't buy the content that requires this.
Create your own content and sell it to others that with no restrictions.
III.IIVIVIXIIVIVIIIVVIIIIXVIIIXIIIIIIIIVIIIIVVIII
Why do I have a feeling no one here was a capture card that could capture a monitors signal at a high resolution (and if you do I bet it costs thousands...)
This is just wonderfull. Just think instead of finishing most of the features, that were to be included in the newest Windows family member, they (MS) decided to integrate DRM, in lie of the file system, and all the other features that were pushed out, or for inclusion much later in the products dev cycle. Well, I know I am not going to partake of the latest offering from Redmond now. I wonder how much Macrovision is getting to cross license this sceme?
My cat's picked up a Hammer. HEY! Put down that Hammer. Put Down that Hamm...THUNK!
Nothing remains the same, evrything changes and so should the content providers. This will only effect the 99.99% of people that legally buy the "premium content", and dont understand why it looks like shit on their screen. As for the other .01% the hack or workaround will only be a google away, and they will happily watch their pirated version.
Jesus wept! These people make my head hurt.
What will probably happen is that lots of people will be required to buy new computers anyway. Imagine if games used this technology to prevent screen shots (not likely unless the computer is more than powerful enough). People will go into stores complaining that their Blue-Ray disc doesn't play. The sales person will tell them that they need a new computer/graphics card/monitor and that is what they will get. People expect that each new version of Microsoft's OS will require new hardware. Win2k on a Pentinum, XP on something less than a highend Pentium III? No, new computer. And guess what it comes with the operating system.
I doubt they have monitors or video cards that can detect, say, a simple splitter or repeater. It's the sort of thing a third-year EE student can build (fourth year for digital signals).
It will stop some casual piracy, you know, the kind companies and congressmen say they don't care about. Mostly it will get Microsoft a piece of the monitor market without the need to develop useful features or compete on price.
"Protected Video Path - Output Protection Management (PVP-OPM) makes sure that the PC's video outputs have the required protection or that they are turned off if such protection is not available."
This one, however, does make sense to me:
" Protected Video Path - User-Accessible Bus (PVP-UAB) provides encryption of premium content as it passes over the PCI Express (PCIe) bus to the graphics adapter. This is required when the content owner's policy regards the PCIe bus as a user-accessible bus."
I would think this one is a little more important in stopping piracy.
Why are there only 19 people folding@home for slashdot?
So, let me get this straight. If I so chose to upgrade to Longhorn, I'd have to buy a whole new videocard and monitor to actually view the OS and any other programs tailor written for it? I am not aware of any videocards that currently offer DVI ports that actually also have HDCP standard (although I could definitely be wrong). Does this mean we'll all have to upgrade to videocards with HDMI ports built in?
I think this is pure idiocy. And people thought Apple moving to Intel based processors because of built-in DRM was a step over the edge...
"Right now, somewhere in this world, Scott Baio is plowing a woman he doesn't love," - Peter Griffin, *Family Guy*
What more to say ... Give the masess food and entertainment but to be sure they get it right you will have to spend a xxx gazillions of bucks for the really needed hardware so you can fully enjoy it.
//sidetrack: What will be MS excuse for that "Protection".
god helps us with such ideas. I am not retard to burn my monitor on purpose but i want the chance to do it.
In fire we trust http://www.getoto.net
"we're not gonna take it. da da da da da-da da. we're not gonna take it da da da da da-da da"
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
WOW!
Some settling may occur during posting.
If they seriously think they could get away with this... they're wrong.
Those anti-trust people are going to start coming out of the woodwork and resume bashing Microsoft's head in.
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
Nice ;-) thanks for that subtle chuckle!
So, of the major features that were originally supposed to be the selling point in Longhorn...
WinFS pretty much seems indefinately stalled.
Avalon seems to be delayed until after release.
The new shell will not be available until the Server release.
But the crippling DRM feature that requires me to have an MPAA approved monitor to get "premium" video quality is right on schedule.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
The vast majority of the time, discussion of DRM on /. falls into the "nobody really cares except for the /. nerds". But this... I know everyone here hates Microsoft, but it's hard to believe they won't end up backing down on this. This is the sort of thing Joe Consumer will raise holy h*ll about, the first time it happens.
I know it's not "just Microsoft", but really - Microsoft can't afford to have the bad press this will generate.
#DeleteChrome
Bad news for Microsoft, good news for other operating systems.
99.99% of people out there never rip content. As these measures usually do, they inconvenience them by requiring them to buy more costly monitors or risk degradation and not allowing legit use. But all it takes is ONE person with the requisite special equipment or a degree in EE to break the DRM once and the copy is out on net for ALL to download. They should give it up already.
This space for rent.
This is the dumbest thing I will read all day. I'm sure everybody will really rush out to buy Longhorn now. Not that they were planning to before.
Slashdot: 24 hours behind every other site or your money back!
"i'm sorry sir, you can't afford to remember that movie now... i know you paid to see it at the cinema, what right does that give you to remember it now? you only paid to see it once. after all you are still enjoying the memory of it - you must pay the actors and writers or else they will starve..."
IMHO, this is another example of the industry shooting itself in the foot, only moreso than they previously have.
It's one thing when joe-consumer downloads a song from the Microsoft music store, and can't copy it to his iPod. It's one thing when joe-consumer buys a DVD, and has a hard time making a VHS copy because his kids keep scratching the crap out her DVDs. Both of these things the average consumer accepts will not work, because consumers are used to different technologies not playing nicely together. They don't know about DRM, but they do know that they could never get those photos aunt Kathy sent to print on their printer, and figure this is more of the same.
If Morgan Freeman has his way, though, and movies are delivered to our homes by internet, consumers will be calling tech support in droves; "I can't watch my movie? What's wrong?" And those consumers will not be happy when they're told the 19" LCD monitor they bought two years ago needs to be replaced. Consumers DO expect to be able to watch a movie they download.
I think, ultimately, this is a nail in the coffin of the unborn movies-by-internet industry, which is a shame.
that no one in their right minds would ever adopt Longhorn. All it will take is word of mouth from the technically inclined explaining to the general public that this is BAD. That this is only one example of how Microsoft and the "content providers" want to be able to CONTROL what you can and cannot do with the computer/monitor that YOU paid YOUR hard-earned money for. Microsoft damn sure didn't pay for your computer, **AA damn sure didn't pay for your computer, and no one else paid for it either! YOU paid for your computer system and YOU should be in control of what "content" you view on it, how you view it, and what you do with that content (except, of course, for selling copyrighted material for profit) INCLUDING the ability to time-shift, format-shift, and any other damn shift you wish. Under no cicrumstances should Microsoft be the arbiter of what a person can view, at what resolution, how they can view it, or any thing else. Until Microsoft buys a computer for me then _I_ decide the hows, whys, and wherefors of material on my computer.
As a group, Slashdot should rise up and vehemently oppose this in public. Start talking to local newspapers, friends, neighbors, and anyone else and explain in easily understood terms that this is an invasion of your person and private property and that it is BAD, BAD, BAAAAAAD. Do no support it.
Dream as if you'll live forever.
Live as if you'll die tomorrow.
~Anonymous~
I'd expect something like that from my grandma, but not on Slashdot.
2
1
Done
-- Hollywood Film makers and Companies selling information which can be copied with 0 cost, at very high prices to masses of millions of idiots.
Big Brother control please. The more I hear these sorts of things, the more I fear we are getting closer and closer to "1984". Though Im sure that Orwell never intended for it to be this bad.
Perhaps we are much closer to the Thought Criminal Winston.......sigh
"God of Rock, thank you for this chance to kick ass. "
This seems like a way people going to promote certain types of monitors by providing video. For example, a very popular video site might be payed by a monitor company so that only there type of monitor is deamed suitable enough, thereby making the millions of site users want to switch monitors.
Voice your opinion!
what kind of fucking perverted retardedness is this?????
Vote with your wallet for either (a) DRM solutions that make sense, or (b) for solutions that don't take advantage of the richly enabled DRM fabic available to content producers.
Sorry, you've been outvoted by the apathetic masses who do what the TV tells them to do. DVD Video DRM doesn't make sense (region lockout; UOP segments that last longer than 30 seconds), and well over 90 percent of DVD Video titles use DVD Video DRM.
If I produce content, I should be able to decide what's done with it (for a reasonable time, anyway).
And why is 95 years (for a work made for hire) reasonable?
Doesnt this go against liberty of choice or somehting!
I mean whatever i want to load on my Windows is my choice and i should be able to run it at the resolution i want without some company telling me i cant run this a hign res because it may damage something.
If i want to destroy my computer it's my choice!
How long until we see something similar with audio? "Users without an appropriately DRM-equipped soundcard will hear down-sampled audio played back through the Windows PC Speaker driver"
Microsoft Word has had this function for years. Just set your font color to "white".
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
The beauty of capitalism is that bad ideas usually die. The consumers dictate whether they will accept this by purchasing or not purchasing it.
Unfortunately, there is such a thing as marketers who create markets where there is none and desire where there should be none. If MS markets this correctly, people will want to give up their freedom.
... is to kill Linux.
Microsoft-only hardware, anyone?
We must be alert to the danger that public policy could become captive to a scientific-technological elite. - Eisenhower
Each time M$ announces a new idea it seems to get crazier and crazier. Go ahead M$, make my day. This is sure to put the nail in the coffin of M$'s desktop monopoly. Now, let's just pray that Linux and Apple are smart enough to capitalise on Billy G.'s blunders.
...that when Longhorn is released, this scary feature doesn't work anything like this article said and (gasp! shock! horror!) slashdot editors are yet again posting up articles which seek to stir up anti-Microsoft sentiment...not that that's a difficult thing on slashdot ;-)
Can you really see Microsoft telling the world - "hey, your DVI TFTs are all obsolete now" - when one of Microsoft's real strengths is the backwards compatibility of the Windows platform. From a purely commercial point of view, that's not likely, is it?
Daern
From the article:
You don't think Apple is going to do this too? What will happen with Linux though? With Linux making inroads into set top boxes there will be some solution for Linux, though I don't think it will make its way to the desktop (legally).
Of course, now with product activation on XP, MS can shut off sales of it at any time simply by refusing to activate new copies.
So how do we stop this freight train? Everyone stay with Win98SE?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
When DRM requires the purchase of new hardware just for things to work like they used to, then thats when it is going to turn off even the clueless consumer who normally wouldn't care. When it starts biting into people's wallets they always stand up and take notice.
In my case, if my monitor is not "secure" enough, finding a replacement might not be so easy. My monitor is an older CRT that presents a very high quality picture. I use this because I dislike the ghosting and viewing angle issues that, while much improved from how they used to be, are still present in LCD monitors.
The problem is that it is hard to find a decently priced, truly good CRT anymore because most of the industry is switching over to flat panel production. They literally don't make them like they used to anymore.
I'm guessing that this technology is just geared towards people using video outs to TVs and Tivo like devices, but I really don't like the idea of being potentially forced to buy a new monitor just for an operating system. That is pretty rediculous.
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
my next computer, while it may be capable of running Longhorn, will instead be running Mac OS X. Apple has not yet become the whiney bitch that microsoft is on issues like this, and therefore will get my support in the future.
I could just imagine someone created a sort of blackbox that fools the PC into thinking that the monitor is opium (OPM) compatible. Connection would be something like this.
PC BlackBox Monitor
PC asks BlackBox - "Are you on opium?"
BlackBox reply - "Sure am, dude."
PC gives BlackBox on-restricted content.
BlackBox gives Monitor onrestricted content.
Hm...
1. Microsoft shell out Longhorn.
2. Foreign country (*cough*TaiwanChinaKorea*cough*) produces BlackBoxes(tm).
3. Opium bypassed.
4. ???? (maybe laugh in their face)
5. PROFIT (for foreign countries).
In US, you can easily buy enough major firearms to wipe out your neighbourhood but a few little fireworks are banned.
How will this affect media center PCs? I know a number of people who are still too poor to afford anything other than VGA-to-TV adapters when playing with this sort of thing.. By then the tech should be cheaper, but still.
"Better to be vulgar than non-existent" -Bev Henson
Do you honestly think it will be possible to purchase and watch content on a linux machine? Do you think the movie industry is going to give you something playable on your un-DRMed box? You might pirate it.
Of course, we all know that making bits not copyable is like making water not wet. But I think you underestimate the MPAA's lobbying capabilities. I fully expect it to be illegal to posses or discuss wet water any day now.
Now i know why it's called longhorn... *imagines microsoft bending users over. this whole drm thing is getting out of hand. At first it seemed like a good idea. Now i have to have a newer DRM style monitor to be able to watch a video? What if i want to use tv out? Soon they will have a Emulated monitor kind of like daemon-tools that will just write the file to disk. Drm doesn't that stand for... Don't Respect Microsoft or maybe Do Remove Microsoft. i can come up with lots Dumb Ridiculous Microsoft
I just recompiled Mplayer 1.0RC7 and it works like magic, I don't even have to keep installing dozens of codecs, because it supports most of them just out of the box. Togheter with KMplayer, I don't need IE of Media Player plugin. Oh yeah, penguins like watching movies and TV on computers.
Wouldn't it be easy to just make a pass between that goes between the video card and the monitor? Then you could tell the video card that your monitor is anything that you want it to be.
Seems like a simple hardware hack to me.
The same problem over and over again: he who has the content, makes the rules. I see this all the time, due to my line of employment.
/. readers, but a large consumer revolt, in order to make a difference.
I do wonder, whether this problem is short-lived. Instead of looking at it from the content provider's side, let's look at if from the customer's side. I, as a customer, don't feel compelled to purchase a new piece of hardware to let me watch content from provider X. In turn, I have two options: suck it up and watch degraded content from X (or perhaps none at all), or I could go to provider Y, who, possibly, does not have the same restrictions. What does that mean? My dollars now have gone to provider Y, instead of X. If provider X continues its hard-nosed approach to content distribution, it will definitely suffer. The problem is that, the suffering is not enough. We really need to have a serious revolt, not just a few devout
But, that's the problem, too. A good majority of consumers are brain-washed into thinking that it's okay to bow down to content providers. You need this type of player, or this type of TV to watch content in "high-res" (think HDCP vs. HDMI). Same thing applies to music. But, that's a whole other can of worms...
Don't get me wrong. I understand the business model: the content providers have to make money, too. That's why they will attempt to leverage technology to protect themselves, so that they can make more money. But wait! That means that consumers are paying double: first, for the content, and then, for the technology to allow us to play this content in an "approved" manner!
Where will it end?
This isn't MSFT's fault. This is MSFT listening to their customers.
We as the consumers, won't use the content if we don't have the hardware. Thus we won't pay for it and those who are asking for this kind of software won't make money. In time DRM compatible may become a "selling point" for products that support this technology. We will have a choice though for what we buy and what content we view. There is always a choice.
Who the heck has HD analog capture equipment? Who is ever going to have HD analog capture equipment, with everything going digital? The analog HD monitor is probably more secure than their drm'd crap. Even the DVI capture equipment is really rare.
Well, that closes up one analog hole that didn't exist in the first place.
As far as Linux, expect that it won't work at all unless someone can manage to find a crack to unprotect content.
start hiring politicians? This spin is making me dizzy.
Hmmm.
Three or four thousand for a decent one. They're pretty much useless for trying to record a movie or something though, as you have to find something to capture and record the audio as well and then go through the hassle of syncing them back together. It's quite a pain in the ass.
If this is what they are going to try and force down our throats, then the solution is very simple for me.
I'll keep Windows XP for the few times I need to do something in Windows. I won't pay them to cripple my computer. Why should I?
All of this reminds of the security versus usability relationship. The more secure something gets, typically, the less user-friendly and more annoying it becomes to use.
These more invasive DRM attempts seem, to me, like they are really beginning to hit that downward slope of diminishing usability. Hopefully, at least. Once they do, and once it becomes unfriendly enough, then maybe, just maybe, the backlash against it will be big enough to drive changes in a positive direction.
Not that I think it will happen, but wouldn't it be something if the thing that finally topples the Microsoft-Intel duopoly (maybe throw in Apple, now) is the forcing of DRM on people, followed by the backlash when these regular people finally get a clue about the so-called DRM bill of goods?
I wonder if we'll ever have anti-competitive, or other class action style lawsuits against companies for preventing people from exercising fair-use rights, or right to shift time and/or media for personal use. As much money as class action lawsuits make for lawyers, seems like at least a few of them would smell this as an opportunity.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
But as soon as you turn the monitor off, you get a phone call from a federal department demanding you to turn it back on.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
GRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
WHY the hell are we, as consumers, always getting raped by these stupid freaking companies? From the idiots who came up with region flags for DVDs to the idiots that want to force us to buy multiple versions of a CD because one version is meant for a computer, another is meant for the cd player and yet a third version is meant for a stereo. And the idiots who implement all sorts of stupid copy protection that they know won't work and only manages to slow down playback or dimishes our fair use rights!
Why do we always have to suffer!??!!? And why are we always just taking it?!?! Unfortunately Micro$oft is not the only problem...any hardware manufacturers that implement similar things in their products are making me Grrrr too.
I just had to Grrrr...sorry.
It will be buggy, non-compatible, and create all sorts of issues. What will the result be? Coporate customers will have to buy new monitors with expensive features to do things legitimately. The casual user will be so annoyed and pissed that he won't bother trying to watch video etc etc over the computer - which is exactly what these companies WANT. Just like the targetted lawsuits by the RIAA scare the casual thieves away, this will do the same (or make it so incredibly annoying) that they will leave this arena as well. Consumers will go back to watching purchased DVD's on DRM enabled DVD players that have a common DRM output to a DRM enabled surround sound etc etc. Stand alone components. And in the end, microsoft will be writing the software for those too.....
Maybe GNUstep would help people migrate over - if they ever get round to beautifying it. Compared to OSX it looks a serious step back.
Blocking read access (by apps) to DRM'ed files unless the app's authorized?
Hey Microsoft! I have here JUST what you need!
*handles vinyl disc player*
As we live in a capitalistic society this of course means the end of Microsoft as an os providor as people generally don't want to buy crap (tm). I mean who would "want" to buy this?! I hope Linux is ready for the desktop (at least for Joe SP) when this rolls out because this is THE chance for linux to explode into the market.
if people don't want crap why would they go to linux?
However, it seems like the real threat to the rights of American citizens is coming from the big corporations and not the government. A lot of people find it bad enough that the RIAA and MPAA use DRM or want to have technologies that require the use of DRM in order to view their product in the way that they want it to be viewed. And now we need a certain type of monitor just to be able to view information on our computers? Just think of how badly companies could abuse this?
Sure Americans have a Constitution that gives us freedoms (speech, religion, etc.) but it's looking like we'll have to buy a certain type of technology just to be able to express those freedoms.
It looks like OS is going to be more than just free as in beer.
This is very unlikely to affect your standard PC monitor. I believe this is more of an effor to prevent you from using your non-windows media center edition PC, as a Media Center. By detecting the "monitor", and making sure it isn't a TV, it will allow them to restrict your ability from watching their content, on your TV without their consent.
If there is anything more important than my ego around here, I want it caught and shot now.
and i still have mo dvd copy of Terminator 2 - Extreme Edition that WONT play because i live outside North-America. and BTW, an online petition wont be enough, this crap must be stopped ASAP :S
[JL] IH8U
I think the point is that making sure the monitor is "trusted" means you don't simply have a video caputure device plugged in.
Of course, you might have your "trusted" monitor plugged in and simply sniff the signal (via a little box between the monitor and the computer that only "listens" to the outgoing analog signals).
This is not a "real" solution, but yet another clue barrier... So now, if you want to build a VGA video capture device, you need to make it just a pass through that passivly observers and does not participlate as if it was a monitor... Simple.
Spell check? Why bother. That is what grammer/spelling Nazi freaks who waiste band width posting "spell right" are for.
I myself am a software developer, but news like this isn't just enough to convert me to Linux or OSX (most likely the latter). I think if the common user saw something like this, it will scare them off too.
I've become so used to doing all my computer work at home on my 50" HDTV. Me = pissed off
As an author, I understand the need to combat intellectual property theft, but this is just ridiculous. And, if Longhorn actually manages to catch on, it invalidates pretty much every single existing monitor out there.
What's next? Microchips in our eyes to make sure that we close our eyes if we're reading something naughty?
Robert B. Marks
Author, Demonsbane in Diablo Archive
It so nice that Microsoft decided to protect that 10 year old certified professional from smut and filth.
Send Peter Clifford Francis Macrae comdoms to 23 Bedford St, St.Neots, PE19 1AX, England
The problem is, people won't KNOW what it is
What this means is, WE HAVE TO TELL THEM.
People aren't going to refrain from buying Longhorn. People in a year or so literally won't have a choice; if you want a new computer you'll be buying Longhorn. However, we can make an impact on the secure monitors. It wouldn't be that hard to convince people (friends, family, neighbors, etc) that the new secure monitors and video cards are to blame (which they are, because if the secure monitors aren't picked up then the feature won't be used by content providers). Explain the feature enough that they'd understand it-- perhaps explain that the movie companies and microsoft want to stop you from doing certain things with your computer, and they can only do it if people buy these monitors-- them that and try to get them to pick some other brand.
Longhorn is unstoppable. Microsoft can and will do literally anything it wants. However a consumer backlash against the feature itself is possible as long as the hardware is targetted. Unfortunately I fear the American consumer is so weak right now no one will bother to try.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Sounds like a racket between the content providers and playback device manufacturers.
I mean... Under this scheme, all I have to do to be a successful pirate is have enough money to afford "compatible" hardware. Running a private, subscription torrent system should cover those costs in little time.
The REAL jabber has the user id: 13196
What you do today will cost you a day of your life
I'd imagine there will be a removal tool to remove it; much like there has been for other annoying built-ins like windows messenger.
is going to wreak a lot of havoc. Imagine a virus that mark's certain application's as protected content with no resolution constrictor... A virus that marks' all microsoft applications as protected content so that they go through a resolution constrictor and look like crap. Just a matter of time before this is exploited in this manner.
! --- WOW, Naked super model. Send me USD10, kplztnx
Of course not. But it is my technological protection measure allowing me to sue the criminal who robbed my house for circumvention of same under the DMCA. That will scare them away for sure. The only thing I'm not decided about is if I should put a warning sign above the lock on each of my doors.
Oh, and btw, that also applies to anyone trying to break in by decoding my digital garage door opener. That case has already gone to court!
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
http://www.redhat.com/
Wouldn't you rather have at least the option of content that you wouldn't normally have?
No. If standard copyright is not enough to promote the progress of motion pictures, then let the major studios feel unmotivated.
You either use the service, or you don't... if it sucks and nobody uses it, the company will change the service or go out of business.
The problem here is the tyranny of the majority. What if the majority of the motion picture industry's customers agree with regulating (in effect banning most) ownership of high definition video cameras by private citizens in order to close the analog hole?
Company's who wish to provide Hi-Def content to PCs won't want to do it if it gets stolen/copied easily
We've been hearing the same tired old excuse since player-piano rolls were going to put musicians out of business. It's time for consumers to plug their ears.
WHY the hell are we, as consumers, always getting raped by these stupid freaking companies?
Becuase you keep buying their product?
I wonder if these "secure" monitors will allow Linux to use them. Will they work like broadcast-flag compatible HDTV capture cards, where it is illegal to allow content to be sent to an open source system? In the case of the broadcast-flag, an open source implementation would completely negate the purpose of the DRM. I don't see the same necessity with a monitor, but maybe Microsoft will use DRM as an excuse to lock out non-trusted (from their perspective) operating systems. Perhaps the trusted monitors perform some kind of key exchange that will be patented and not licensed openly?
If they did lock out Linux in this way, I think that would be a bigger problem than Windows locking out non-trusted Monitors. How many people would try Linux if their Microsoft certified monitor wouldn't let them?
If the content providers can't deal with the technology world they live in, which includes the ability for bits to be copied, fuck 'em.
Not much to see here, please move along.
--- Hot Shot City is particularly good.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This is not a feature. A feature is something that increases the functionality of software.
Sometimes, the number of works available to view through a given program is considered a feature of that program. The thinking is that more authors and publishers will feel an incentive to publish more works through a more restrictive media playing architecture than through a less restrictive media playing architecture.
getting a little out of hand
It is obvious that the days of someone building your own computer and putting the os of your choice on it are numbered.
I for one am glad we are putting security decisions in the hands of vendors instead of the stupid customers who don't know any better and who also don't know what they need access to.
I think this will be great for Linux though in the end.
That should be Mr Hands.
We apologize for the error.
This WHOLE thing is moot. We all know that DRM does't work and people go out of their way to avoid DRM content.
.wmv to secure online video, we use XviD. They region encoded DVDs, China starts pumping out millions upon millions of region free DVD players.
For instance, they made ATRAC as a secure format for digital music, we all still use mp3. They made
So who wants to bet that this DRM will die still born along with the rest of the attempts to restrict media?
Sometimes I wish I was a plumber, then I'd know how to deal with other people's shit.
I'll try to keep myself away from the monitors for a couple of months and keep using XP.
What does your Credit Report look like?
Create your own content
And get sued for subconscious copying, or hypothetically run into heavy red tape around the private ownership of HD camcorders, enacted in order to help close the analog hole.
let me get this right... ...i PAY for the content then get a crappy resolution because my monitor is out of date? yeah, that is really going to work.
always mosh clockwise
... a mouse which can't click on certain links due to 'drm' constrictions, where the OS determines the user is not allowed to use the supplied anti-MS, anti-profit making link?
Veni, Vidi, Velcro!
If you have a problem with this, then don't blame Microsoft. Blame the media providers. If you don't like having to buy a new monitor that supports their DRM requirements, do not buy their media content. When no one buys their media content, they will change their requirements or go out of business. Simple enough.
All Microsoft is doing is providing the method to enforce the DRM, but are not actually offering the DRM.
DRM is only meant to protect the digital bits (thereby producing a perfect copy), not the analog signal which already has lost some quality.
and I did not speak outbecause I was not a Jew.
Then they came for the Communists
and I did not speak outbecause I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the trade unionists and I did not speak outbecause I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for me
and there was no one left to speak out for me.
First they DRM'd the software and I did not speak out because I used non-DRM'd software.
Then they came DRM'd the OS and I did not speak out because I stuck to non-DRM'd OS.
Then they DRM'd the firmware and I did not speak out because I used non-DRM'd firmware.
Then they DRM'd the hardware and there was no where to run my non-DRM'd firmware, OS and software.
--Me
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
This is the craziest thing i've ever heard of. I think my interest in Longhorn just went away.
I wonder if the MPAA is working on something similar... Speaker Based DRM. Don't got the right pair of high quality speakers = cruddy sounding tunes?
Insert Sig Here
Heck they may have it out and running first -- and forcing you to accept it since it will the in the only OSX to run on Intel hardware.
(Maybe you do think Apple would never stoop this low. After all, you now seem to think that unseen unshipped Intel processors are suddenly better than IBM PPC processors.)
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Under this scheme, though, you are screwed by the time you get to see what services are out there. You buy Longhorn, you've just given control of your machine to more than content producers. You've handed control of your machine to a third party - be it Hi-Def content producers or Microsoft itself. You've given someone else the right to redefine *your* rights under copyright law and to control to which materials you even have access - now DRM becomes censorship.
This may not be how DRM starts out but it certainly is where it *can* lead.
What about my right to make a backup of digital content I've licensed for viewing? My DVD collection is a prime example - Jack Valenti once said something akin to "digital lasts forever" but the only reason that is even remotely true is because I can find a copy of every movie I own online and burn a copy if I chose. It certainly is not because DVDs last forever - a few scratches (and if you have young children in the house this is very easily done) and you are done.
This has been said before but I'll say it again because it is appropriate: content producers need to decide: are you licensing content or are you selling a product? If you are licensing content then you are telling me to what limits I can use your content - the medium upon which I place your content should not matter. If you are selling a product, then I can do whatever I want with the product as long as I do not violate the copyrights upon the content.
Remember, among your rights as a consumer are the rights to time- and space-shift the content you are entitled to possess (be it via explicit relationship defined by the exchange of money for goods and services or be it via the implied relationship defined by trading your time and eyeballs watching advertisements).
In general, as a software developer and an individual who would like to make a living as a writer someday, I understand the debate over intellectual property/copyright and DRM. I understand why content producers are concerned. However, you cannot have it both ways. DRM tries to let the content producers usurp or otherwise limit *your* rights in favor of their own and that is a very bad thing.
Can't wait to see all the DRM free home made movies
Be sure to read that second link in the summary as well. Looks like they have the same thing planned for audio too! DRM'd speakers, anyone?
I mod down all the "free iPod"-sig losers.
*sigh* Kids and their attempts to be cool by imitating slang...
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.
Could somebody please explain how this makes anything more secure, all I can see is a forced upgrade. What kind of attacks is a "secure" monitor protected from, or what is it securing - protecting the image from prying eyes?
This makes no sense to me.
Unfortunately the choice the public will see is likely to be between:
- Buy Longhorn, and be able to view this premium video content.
- Run Linux/MacOS/BSD and not be able to view this content.
Sure, it may be possible for someone to crack the encrypted path, and distribute unrestricted versions online. But you can't exactly advertise that in your marketing campaign, whereas Microsoft can advertise this premium content as only being available on Longhorn.I think this can only hurt other OSes.
Wouldn't this just be done at video card or motherboard level or more likely software level? I'm assuming it will still have a standard output to any generic monitor, the average person wouldn't upgrade to a new monitor for a new OS.
Actually from the microsoft white paper:
>PVP-UAB provides the last internal link in the Longhorn content protection chain, to ensure that the premium video content reliably makes it from the Longhorn Protected Environment to being rendered on the card without a copy of the content being stolen.
So it's not a monitor thing, and the article writer appears to be a dumbass.
I wonder if this will also be used in protecting Office documents and Acrobat-generated PDF files.
It would be a pain if monitor-DRM'd documents could no longer be OCR'd to an image file or Print Screen'd to the clipboard.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A, START
I'd rather whine about the content creators that want to have it this way...
This wouldn't be an issue if we didn't have paranoid movie companies.
Personally, I think it's a matter of who's developing the support -- just like Longhorn will indirectly support movie piracy like Windows XP does by not preventing it, it will supporting this technology. If Microsoft wouldn't, the movie companies would probably develop software for it instead.
Actually, just like Linus isn't against DRM in Linux, I bet he doesn't have problems with this support becoming a part of the Linux kernel in the future either, which is actually just another one in the long line of DRM technologies. At least I can't see a reason to why he with his stance of allowing anyone to use Linux for anything you want to, including watching protected content, would change that stance now.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Wow... Longhorn really will be more secure!
meh.
I've always wanted to learn how to really play the harmonica, rather than dragging my water soaked harp out of the glass I keep it in and playing along with Dylan's greatest hits.
I think I'll start spending my hard earned dollars on fishing tackle, back yard BBQ's, camping equipment and other forms of self entertainment. Screw the content providers, Microsoft, Cable companies, Intel and other hardware providers supporting DRM.
Personally, I'm beginning to hate computers and this fight for rights etc. and believe everyone needs to unplug from the entire power grid more often.
...but MOD PARENT UP, please. Forget the Software Patents that people have been crowing about for so long; if Free Software is to be killed (or at least, crippled so that using it is so impractical and restrictive that no one even bothers), it will be via hardware DRM, probably coupled with government mandate that states that only machines running Trusted Computers (read: hardware DRM, plus Windows Enhanced DRM Edition; possibly a completely static and neutered version of Linux, if we're lucky) can even connect to the net.
What the planet really needs is more people throwing CRTs into the garbage. Way to go, Microsoft,
for making it happen!
If only we could charge them for the environmental damage they're going to cause. =/
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Why don't we skip this step with the CRTs, LCDs and all and fast-forward directly to biotech DRM?
That way they can go strait to the point and
implant DRM directly on our retina so we won't see content we're not supposed to.
You know it's coming, it's just a matter of time!
Slashdot should morph the Billgatus icon into Darth Vader or Emperor Palpatine. Since we will all soon (a relative term) know the power of the Longhorn-side:
As you can see, my young [FOSS Fanatic], your friends have failed. Now witness the firepower of this FULLY ARMED and OPERATIONAL [DRM technology]!--Emperor Palpatine
But there was still hope, after all:
"The more you tighten your grip... the more star systems will slip through your fingers."--Princess Leia
May the FOSS be with you!
Has microsoft's arrogance finally become their downfall. Now they believe that they and thir corporate counterparts can do whatever they want and we are just supposed to buy it. I for one wont be purchasing longhorn and I find it hard to believe anyone else wouuld be subjected to having to buy more restrictive hardware to replace already functioning and capable hardware just for their shitty OS. More so, microsoft should pay more attention to creating a stable and secure OS and less attention in how to control the world with it and to make money for them and their hardware buddies. Its bad enough in a couple of years everyone will have to buy new TVs, whether they can affors it or not. I for one wont be buying one..I only watch DVDs as it is, and I can do tht on my computer so I'll just through my tv set on my congressman's lawn as he only lives a few minutes away. Everyone should find their government representatives homes and dispose of their tvs on their front lawns. Just an idea!
This is what we get for buying iTunes music, CDs, and DVDs. Back to the torrent everyone. Make them squeal.
Except we don't get degraded playback, we get no playback.
How many desktop Linux users in the U.S. users have licensed DVD playback software? (Now now, don't be mean, us Linux-only desktop users *do* exist)
That's right, maybe a couple percent. By far the majority of desktop linux users use Xine or Mplayer, using the illegal libdecss.
It doesn't come with our distributions, you have to download the library seperately.
Do you *really* think that MS will managed to make this scheme uncrackable? I'm more than a little suspicious. We'll go on using our quasi-legal software until some giant decides to pickup the market (like PowerDVD linux) and start selling a package that will handle the decryption of this content on Linux PCs.
Then 80% of us will continue using the quasi-legal software, and the remander will use the software.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
Um ... have you seen the parking lots at your local McDonald' and/or Wal*Mart lately?
In my experience, people ... especially American People ... LOVE to buy "crap".
But a simple splitter will let you get a copy of the encrypted data, which you can then hack on at your leisure. You can FTP a copy to, say, Norway where a buddy can play with it without having to buy hardware.
subject says it all.
Engadget has just posted a description of a hardware 'fix', the Spatz DVIMAGIC box: http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000230050640/ Given that it specifically breaks the DRM and opens the company up to attack via the DCMA, it seems likely to a limited edition.
The solution is simple ... in 50 years when this is released and the /. community is 10^8 large. We can all simultaneously call the 800 number for customer service, walk away from the phone and let the company rot from its toll charges.
This isn't going to mean you aren't going to be able to use your computer unless you have a new monitor. It just means the Multimedia capabilities for video are going to be more restrictive. Big deal. DVD players ect. are so cheap now who cares. So you won't be able to rip off protected content. Oh well. What a bunch of chicken little BS.
so will the tech to fool it. It's only a matter of time until someone finds a way to spoof a compliant monitor. Maybe it will be entirely software, like a tweaked video driver. Maybe it will be a pass-through dongle that you connect between the monitor and video card. Maybe a combination of the two. But it's possible. And you know it will be slashdotted when it happens. ^_^
As long as you have the entire file containing the data there is always going to be a way to view that data in the way that you want to. Unfortunately, if the restrictions are built into the operating system, it might be rather hard to get around. Operating systems should simply be an abstraction layer between the hardware and the user that allows him to do more things more easily. It shouldn't restrict what he can do. If Microsoft does indeed go down this path then I think a lot of people will either refuse to upgrade or try some other operating system.
Cyde Weys Musings - Scrutinizing the inscrutable
For telling me what I can and cannot watch!
'feature' should really be in quotes. Sounds like a bug to me.
-M
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
And you really think all the content providers will give up completely on this huge market if they can't have it entirely their own way?
I don't for a moment. It's too big. They'll whine and moan and try to get laws passed, and then they'll adapt and make more money than ever before. Every attempt at restrictive formats (remember the original DIVX) has failed, and the content providers continue to make more money from new formats (e.g. DVDs) than old formats (gone to a movie lately?).
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
Gentoooooo!
First of all, it means they've failed to put their CrapWare(tm) in the computer's firmware. Less cruft in my motherboard is a Good Thing. Not that it would have killed Linux, anyway -- the Open Source community is pretty good at working around things like that. But still.
Second of all, this means that in order to access their movie content and so on, you'll have to have one of the "special" monitors, but the system will only work through Windows -- it's primarily a software solution which looks for the monitor feature, and fucks up the imagery if it doesn't find it. So, again, Linux remains unaffected.
Third, if we Linux guys decided to buy something like a future game console or set-top box (we wouldn't run a Windows computer per se, of course, because we're already wonderfully served by our Linux boxen) it would probably have this built-in, and we'd be able to do what we wanted with it.
I'd say it's not a bad idea overall.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
If I were to be a dedicated enemy of such technology, then I would find a way to get to the content and circumvent the technology.
Imagine, for example I want to copy such a movie.
All I really need to do to get the picture, is to splice the cables and make a Y-connection somewhere.
Ok, so maybe that can be detected - Then I'll just use my digital video camera to film it off the screen and STILL put it on the Internet.
You just can't beat it, OK?
Longhorn or Shorthorn. Doesn't matter.
It's just the next big buzz to get something sold..
And I'm not selling FUD, try to RTFA and you will get what's going on here.
Before they finish off ruining the economies of the world with their fraudulant products and anti-consumer, pro-criminal actions.
This is just one more proof positive that bill gates, masters the art of doing 'bad things' very well, and 'good things' very poorly.
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
http://www.spatz-tech.de/spatz/dvi_magic.htm
Magic de-HDCPed DVI. Completely illegal in the USA thanks to the DMCA, but the rest of the world can enjoy our content at full resolution.
The part that always strikes me as weird about that arguement is that from the companies point of view, it doesn't matter if there's one person pirating the content, or if everyone's pirating it. Once a pirated copy at full quality and no DRM gets released, it will be duplicated until everyone who wants to steal a copy of the original will do so. So, if that's the case, DRM is only useful to the media companies if they can prevent ALL users from pirating the content.
And that's the problem. I find it hard to believe that any DRM will be able to prevent a single copy of the content in question from being released onto the internet. And once it's out, it's out. No amount of DRM or wishing will put it back in. The person who will be most inconvenienced will not be the high end pirate, who will find a way around the system, but the low grade pirate and the home user. It seems as though the media companies are going after the wrong target.
Just an observation.
--
RumorsDaily
Protected Video Path - Macular Interface Neural Encryption (PVP-MINE) provides encryption of premium content as it passes between the user's retina and the visual centers of the user's brain. This is required when the content owner's policy regards the optic nerve as a user-accessible bus. Convenient sight management implants allow content owners to manage their media rights without unnecessarily encumbering the user's computer system.
I wonder how long after Longhorn comes out will it take before I can buy a dongle/connector that emulates the PVP signal? And what about all the people like me who work with video professionally. Crap like this sounds like a serious red flag to me.
Does anyone seriously think that computers will be different from every other technology where the manufacturer has locked out the end user (Automobile, Television, etc)?
DRM is coming... like it, hate it, fight it... it's coming. Doesn't mean we have to make it easy and for once the end user has a chance thanks to Linux...
I
Between people just buying the 'shiny package' that is on sale, and business that are forced to upgrade then get caught in the scam, it wont be so simple as 'just dont buy it'.
Choice doesnt apply when you hold most of the market in your grasp. You get to make the long term rules.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
People aren't going to stop buying Britney Spears CDs no matter what the RIAA does because they like Britney Spears, and anyway, there's stuff going into their purchase decision besides just what the RIAA does.
People aren't going to stop buying Madden no matter what EA does because they like Madden, and anyway, there's stuff going into their purchase decision besides just what EA does.
But a monitor? People have no attachments to monitors. They're pretty much interchangeable, as are many PC parts, from the average apathetic consumer's perspective. You can't get someone to stop buying Britney Spears CDs because there's no way you'll be able to get them to look at the britney spears cd and see just the RIAA tactics that produced it. But, you can get them to look at this monitor or that monitor and just see the DRM. And you can do this because really, other than the DRM, what distinguishing features does the monitor have?
I don't think it's just apathy. Buying different music requires sacrifices. Buying different commodity PC parts does not require sacrifices.
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
Oh, but it is brilliant marketing...
Imagine that Joe 6pak has never viewed HD content on his PC. Then along come the MPAA and Microsoft announcing, "Now you can watch HD on your PC with Longhorn!" Upon reading the fine print, finds that he needs a "better" monitor, but he can watch for now at "slightly reduced quality." After this, he begins budgeting his monitor "upgrade."
So the makers of monitors and panels will be made happy by this additional upgrade churn.
Notice that Joe doesn't know he's been disabled, he thinks he's been enabled. Perhaps that's why the MPAA is playing so tightly with the broadcast flag. Most people may never know that the broadcast flag takes away rights, they'll just know that after the broadcast flag, they'll gain the ability to watch HDTV on computers. I wonder if there will be some sort of "technical reason campaign" to explain why free and open recording just can't work under HDTV, unless you have a broadcast flag.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
It'll be like macrovision. All you need is a cheap video stabalizer and it's all good to plug into another VCR, etc.
But lets be serious- do you really see somebody with a handi-cam taking video from their monitor? Or do you really see someone using their RGB out to pipe it into a $300 downconvert box to plug into a recorder?
Why skip the digital step? DRM as we all say, won't stop anyone with a will. Why not just convert your video to DVD and burn it off, pop it into a DVD player. Or MPEG. Who would use the monitor outputs in the first place to steal video when you can record it in a digital form?
PS: And this better not prevent me from plugging my laptop into my big screen to watch movies, etc- I doubt my TV is a 'certified' monitor.
when you see the word 'Linux', drink!
Workaround for secure-monitor: Install linux.
So what if I cant watch "secure content" ? I dont watch/listen to "semi-secured" content anyway. I'm not going to buy into a "restricted use" hardware platform.
DRM is the equivelent of a proprietary OS. Sure, its "open" to the players who join the club for content development, but it serves the same purpose of the early MAC-OS - keep developers OUT.
Obviously, MS's main customer focus is on content providers (ie Media-10, XP activation, XBOX hardware protection etc), not end level users. Thats a fine corporate decision for them, but, its not the direction I'm willing to go. Its not the direction my development corporation is going.
We're migrating legacy apps off MS platforms. New development is specifically not using MS platforms. Funny how the development world has come full circle: in the 80s the Microsoft platform was "open" for development, API's were published, and the cost of entry was reasonably low - all in the face of locked development platforms like Mini/MainFrames. Take the view that apps are really content development.
Now, the means for content development is steadily being locked down. MS will continue to make their money with content providers with lots of sheep locked into their Paladium-Pens. Oh well. For the rest of us, we'll be using some type of Lx platform to continue our content creation.
The only PT Boat Journal on the web: http://www.PT171.org
Ultimately hardware options are not a solution pirates can use, since watermarking could easily identify which person freed some content from DRM. The number of people capable of freeing content is directly proportional to the ease in identifying them (and thus shutting them down).
The big problem in terms of maintaining freedom over your own computer is the BIOS. Nowadays it is compressed and encrypted, so if one day it started refusing to load non-authorised operating systems you could easily have a situation where only longhoard would load, it wouldn't let you load drivers or even read the decoding software instructions to simulate it, etc. So that's the key piece, since if that goes DRM-only then the only options are to a) hack the os or b) emulate the entire computer. But to do (b) you'll have to read keys, etc from hardware which can be made extremely difficult.
Of course hacking longhoard will be easy, for now, but ultimately that's a losing proposition. So people with the skill and that care should contribute to the open bios project.
I on the other hand, contrary to the basic /. reflexes, welcome this new "feature" along with the others in line brought to us by Corporate America(TM).
First it was paying for products (what's wrong with that, if you want something you should pay for it).
Then it was paying for upgrading/expanding of products (what's wrong with that if you want more of a product you should pay for it).
Then it was paying for every function of a product (what's wrong with that if you want functionality you should pay for it).
Then it was repeatedly paying for product functionality (what's wrong with that if you want multiple uses of functionality you should pay for it you communist!).
Welcome, welcome I say. One day you will have even Joe SP raging in communistic libels agains you and bringing your Corporate America Empire down with a thud!
The worst enemy of capitalism is capitalism. I will just sit back and enjoy they show...
Yam, yam, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade, uga booga, yam, yam, yade, yade
Remember those old TRS80 and Amiga games that required you to enter "Page x, Line y, Word z" from the manual every time you started the game, or software with dongles that didn't work half the time? Because of these nuisances, I got pirated versions of software I bought and paid for earlier!. I doubt that DRM will work flawlessly, without the user noticing that it's there. The issue with older monitors being denied access is just one example. If you are punishing legitimate customers like this, you will be practically driving them into the hands of the warez sites. We have that right if a company is abusing its monopoly. If Microsoft had perhaps a 30-50% market share, they would not dream of striking a deal with content providers that does not benefit the customer any way you slice it. But because they practically own the market, they can. And if you think of simply not buying Longhorn and sticking with XP, think again. Microsoft can, as they have proven in the past, force consumers and corporations alike to upgrade, if you want support or access to the latest software and security patches.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
We live in a capitalist society, and in that kind of society products and services and provided by companies based on the greatest demand.
The analogy between demand and votes, often called voting with one's dollar, is a common rhetorical device. Besides, apathetic American voters elected the Republican and Democratic legislators who enacted the anticircumvention provisions of the DMCA by voice vote, putting us into this mess in the first place.
When your right to vote gets taken away because your black, or your right to drive gets taken away because you're a woman, then you can start complaining.
My right to vote, and the right of everybody else who doesn't agree with the platform of the GOP or the ASS to vote, is already taken away under the equilibrium of Duverger's Law, which applies to all first-past-the-post election systems.
by the media companies. hope they bought enough stock to make the failure their own.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
The technology is available right now for your own enjoyment! Why wait tomorrow?
Where is the 'this is a joke' foot icon?
This has to be a sick joke... right.. someone tell me this is a joke..
Ok, so i know they are dead serious.. and that is sad.
Remember their goal of 'secure end to end' transmissions? That wasnt just for audio.....
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Can't wait for the Section 504 and Section 508 issues to come about from this - we'll then see if commercial interests can control all content after it is 'purchased'.
~Gildas
like all other techniques, this one will soon be defeated:
;)
% cat opaquefile | unmsoftit > clearfile
just give dvd-jon some time and it will happen
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
The fact is piracy has always been and will always be. Even back in the early 80s when I had an Apple II (not a plus, not an "e") somehow my very straight laced dad always ended up with games for me on floppy diskettes which originated at the computer store which mentioned "Pacific Coast Pirates" and other such groups. --- --I think it's a perfect analogy: Just like the politicians who manipulate the public with fear and convince them to give up their liberties for false security, promising to "win the war on terrorism" when it cannot be "won" anymore than the "war on drugs" can be won with prohibitionist policies. If someone wants to hurt people bad enough (especially if they are willing to die)- they will find a way, and imprisoning the public is no way to provide safety. It only gives the govt more control. ---- - crippling growth and technology in order to stop some people (mostly people who wouldn't or couldn't afford to purchase anyway) from getting free software is utterly ridiculous. There is so perfect security, and one of two things will happen - either I will suck so bad nobody will want it. OR people will figure out a way around it. Why waste people's time and good will treating them like they cannot be trusted and as such deserve to have partially crippled products.
Microsoft is not the bad guy here. OK, so they are the bad guy, but not the baddest guy. They are simply funtioning as enablers for the content providers.
... don't blame the technology ... something like that. Seems like that standard should apply to Microsoft as well as Bittorrent.
It is the content providers who will be specifying that no one with an old monitor will be allowed to see their content. Microsoft is simply making that possible.
Linux is no solution, since the same content providers will be sure to NOT release their content on any format that can be viewed on Linux. We aren't talking mpeg's here. This content will be super duper DRM'd wma's or ra's (the kind that mplayer will never be able to deal with, and no player that works with Wine will handle either)
Go with Linux and you won't be able to view this content even if you get a DRM'd monitor.
OK, we can whine that Microsoft is enabling content providers to provide way encumbered content, but that is sort of like whining that P2P enables piracy. What do they say around here
In the best possible scenario, this will lead to new content being available online. Movies still in theaters at DVD (or higher) resolution. Stuff that we will never (legally) see without DRM to make the content providers happy.
In the worst possible scenario, this will lead to the low res crappy content thet is available now being tied up with more hoops to jump htrough before you can see it. (And drive yet another nail into the Linux-as-media-player coffin)
In either case, it will be the content providers (Why am I using use plural? I know the MPAA has the only vote that counts on this one) content provider to determine whether this results in more or less content being available and playable.
Microsoft is just making it possible for them to make those decisions. (and gloating over how this could be very very bad for Linux)
AMSTKTT
"All your hardware belongs to us."
I'm sorry, I just couldn't resist.
Chicken fried butter sticks? Do
Company's who wish to provide Hi-Def content to PCs won't want to do it if it gets stolen/copied easily.
Did all studios stopped offering DVDs once they could be easily copied? Did the easy extraction of content mean that CDs were no longer released? No. Of course not.
You are right that this is all about choices: It's about giving content owners the choice of whether you will be able to exercise your fair-use rights to copy, transcode, time-shift, loan, or sell the content that they provide.
The content providers want you to have to buy multiple copies of things that you should only have to buy once. They want you to purchase a hi-def copy of a movie for your media center PC. Then they want you to have to purchase another copy another copy to watch on your laptop when you go on a business trip. They want to be able to keep you from lending your copy to a friend without that friend paying them to watch it. They want to keep you from selling your used movie through Amazon or ebay (by refusing a license to the purchaser). And they want to decide whether their content will be available for rent. DRM gives them all of these capabilities.
We should all be very afraid, angry, and be politically active to prevent this massive power-shift from consumers to content providers.
That doesn't mean it won't eventually happen. Maybe the MPAA will love this so much that they refuse to listen to anyone else and they demand that all vendors do it. Then Apple might be forced to. But it won't happen unless push comes to shove.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
So I don't have a compatible monitor for this video? Too bad, I guess I will just have to pirate it. No skin off my back.
It amazes me that things that cripple technology can be called "features."
Freedom would be not to choose between black and white but to abjure such prescribed choices. -Theodor Adorno
Ok Jon, how many minutes do you need to deal with this kind of "features"?
Hacker #1: I can crack that DRM in 5 days. Hacker #2: I can crack that DRM in 2 days. Hacker #1: I can crack that DRM in 3 hours. Hacker #2: Crack that DRM.
the original quote was regarding mass murder and genocide. to compare that to DRM trivializes it.
That's precisely the question, and we'll just have to see.
Generally, when one asks "Will it run ____?" the blank is filled in with some commercial piece of software, usually a game or a productivity app. And the answer will always be yes: Photoshop, MS Office, Half Life 83, etc. will all run beautifully on this. Probably even the old versions will, since they're not video players. The same will apply to all of the most common media players; in fact, Windows Media Player will run right there.
The most obvious question from the slightly more insightful user is, "Will it play my existing DVDs?", and that's the biggest question mark. If the answer turns out to be "No", if somebody upgrades their laptop and discovers the next time that they board an airplane that they have to read the in-flight magazine rather than watch Tomb Raider 9 3/4, then you're going to see some serious, serious backlash.
I'm going to assume that MS knows that, and so existing DVD formats will probably play exactly as they do now (which does have various protections anyway, though they're easily bypassed.)
Instead, I expect that this will apply primarily to new content (or rather, newly-coded content). For that, question would be "But will it run NFF (New Fangled Format)?" and the answer is "Yes". The flip side, "Will NFF run on my existing box" will be "No", but I think that user backlash on that is smaller than you might expect. They could take it as an opportunity to switch to Linux/OS X/PDP 11, but as long as they're buying a new computer, they could buy one with Longhorn, which will run NFF along with all of their old programs.
The user is kept on the upgrade treadmill because at each step the logical choice will be "forward" rather than "right" or "left". That's partly because they expect that a side-step will just put them on a different treadmill, which is a whole different debate.
So I don't expect this to cause a mass defection from Windows, at least not by itself. Other factors (cheaper Macs, improved Linux, the stunning revival of the Timex Sinclair) will make it hard to tease out whether I'm right or wrong, so maybe all this is moot, but, well, it's Slashdot and I get to shoot my mouth off anyway.
Between US technology generating less and less capable devices and US Media generating less and less desirable content.
No matter who wins this technology will soon be able to declare total victory:
"See! Nobody is stealing your content any more!"
I wonder if the lawyers have figured out that they are putting themselves out of business? I at least give them credit for being ABLE to figure it out. Microsoft and Intel are another story.
they're probably well on their way to incorporate this commie thinking into keyboards and processors.
Like I said above where I call for the closing down of Microsoft, bill gates is very good at being bad.
-- The InterNet is a terrible thing to waste, so let's have a citizens arrest of bill gates and company before it's tooo late.
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
and my old monitor is small and round.
People will be wowed by the advances in technology that they miss because they only upgrade once every 3 or 4 years.
They'll fail to see that their new shiny flatscreen is worse than their goldfish-bowl crt.
http://www.research.ibm.com/gsal/tcpa/tcpa_rebutta l.pdf
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/archive/security/ news/ngscb.mspx
http://www.iaik.tu-graz.ac.at/teaching/03_advanced %20computer%20networks/ss2005/vo11/Palladium_LaGra nde.pdf
http://download.microsoft.com/download/1/8/f/18f8c ee2-0b64-41f2-893d-a6f2295b40c8/TW04055_WINHEC2004 .ppt
God only knows what governments and particularly industries are pulling your strings M$.
What the fuck is a 'secure monitor' anyway ?
I partly blame everyone else though, everyone has let this sort of crap happen, turning away from the serious SHIT that has been forced down the throats of the gullible since 9/11. When was this guilty until proven innocent nonsense implimented across all of IT ? No one asked me about it. Go fuck yourself Microsoft, seriously. Stop pandering to the MIAA. Fuck me, half of the stuff that comes out of Hollywood you would have to PAY ME to watch it's so fucking bad.
And we can bet Apple will be just the same. Well all you little brain dead puppy wuppys who want your 1337 closed platform DRM MS or Apple junk you go have it because you have created this monster and you deserve it.
Me as a long time Mac user I'm dumping OS X and moving to Linux. This DRM thing has got way way out of hand and I've had enough.
I really hate all of this meddling by ms and all the others (apple, ..).
Leave that crap on yar media pc's (mediacenter/tivo whatever) but fooked if I'll ever allow them wee black boxxes in any pc I use for office related work. (porn, email, porn, internet) Or porn.
instead of farting about with all those drm thingies, how about innovating my desktop OS or making it's daily use more ergonomical etc.
Useful stuff for the user, not the media industries, that's what I wanna see.
No, seriously. Linux will be able to play these DRM videos, whereas Windows won't.
This is already case with DeCSS. Why would the next thing be any different? Windows will refuse to do what people want it to, whereas Linux will continue to obey its users.
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
will be as popular as pay toilets. Something no one is going to bother getting. Afterall, the more restrictive something is made, the less likely people will buy it.
Okay, so MSFT's "Longhorn" will have some fairly
restrictive DRM -- didn't we all know that this
was coming, considering all the background
"chatter" (eg. "Trusted Computing", "Palladium",
etcetera)?
With this news, it isn't hard to imagine that any
future "Media Center OS" from MSFT will be bundled
ONLY with some very specific hardware lockins,
including exclusive and proprietary drivers --
effectively locking out (1) alternative non-MSFT
and OEM (Sony?) approved hardware, as well as (2)
alternative OSes (linux?). Flexibility, and IMHO
user-friendliness, will be eliminated.
One cannot help but wonder, considering both the
timeline for "Longhorn" and the timeline for the
heavily DRMed upcoming Intel processor/chipset,
if this same future awaits Apple's x86 platform?
I was referred to this article on another site.
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=24638
Intel to cut Linux out of the content market
Comment East Fork off key
By Charlie Demerjian: Friday 15 July 2005, 10:01
INTEL IS ABOUT TO CUT Linux out of the legitimate content market, and hand the keys to the future of digital media to Microsoft at your expense. Don't like it? Tough, you are screwed. The vehicle to do this is called East Fork, the upcoming and regrettable Intel digital media 'platform'. The funny part is that the scheme is already a failure, but it will hurt you as it thrashes before it dies. Be afraid, be very afraid.
To-do List: Receive telemarketing call during a tornado warning. Check.
I'm not stupid enough to buy it... the problem is that most people are.
To which I want to know, how much are you depriving yourself? Is there content you genuinely wish to see, but you deprive yourself because you object to the model by which it's sold to you?
If you're of the opinion that "The RIAA makes crappy music" and "The MPAA makes crappy movies", then it's a bit disingenuous for you to declare as "stupid" those people who live with the restrictions to see the content they want to see/hear.
They want what they want, and they pay the price they're willing to pay to get it. They're tastes may be barbaric, but in aggregate they're smart enough to get what they want. And they seem to be able to continue to get what they want: they're not choking off non-DRM choices so much as the non-DRM producers aren't producing what they want.
Most LCD monitors that are new, you can see the pixels on the screen so it really doesn't matter. The picture is already pixelated enough. But all it would take is a creative hack to make a dongle to get around the issue. If MAC ID's can be spoofed, so can monitor ID's. Long live the penguin!!!!
it's been my experience that something marketed as an LCD TV is considerably more expensive than an equivalent or better LCD monitor and a TV tuner
Most stand-alone TV tuners do not have a noise-reducing rescaler that expands noisy analog 480i content to 480p, do they? Most stand-alone LCD monitors aren't 30 inches or larger diagonal, are they?
Anyone who doesn't care, which is going to be a lot of people.
I disagree. And here is why: I worked at CHIMPUSA while in college, and I saw a lot of stupid, clueless people come through the doors. Most people appreciate quality, but are so uneducated about computers that they don't know what makes for a 'quality' computer. When they figure out what is good and what is junk, most will go for the higher quality machine. People tend to make good decisions when they have some solid facts.
However, I will mention this, there is a small segment of the shopping population that didn't care anything about quality at all and bought the cheapest POS in the store. They wanted to spend as little as possible, and they didn't care what they got. I'd put them at perhaps 10% of the market, though.
I think Linux's failure to capture the desktop (so far!) is partially a result of people not understanding why it might be better. Stuff like auto-bundeled DMR might add another argument for open-sores software.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
Innovation? Must be
I
Get a Clue? It sounds to me like you should get a clue You're generalizing everybody who posts here as being some cliched stereotype of a nerd. I use MS products (even though that's unpopular and some of their decisions lately are lame -like this DRM bullshit). I don't like star trek or wear a pocket protector - I could probably outthink, out program yolu as well as kick your ass, but I'm just not that type of girl (or guy). That's what message boards are for, is to post opinions. When the only opinion you have to offer is that everyone else on the board is a stupid dork, well - that says more about you than the board. (as cartman says " You just got f'd in the A")
'why' MS is doing this.
It's evident that there are plenty of people who are now less likely to buy Longhorn *looks around*, but surely making your product unattractive is not really any way to be a capitalistic market gorilla.
So - there must be an upside to this somewhere. Maybe there is, I hate the idea of DRM, but think of the iPod/iTunes. All those nifty litttle DRM devices suddenly spawned an online music market. Maybe when there is a large market of DRM supporting desktops out there, we'll suddenly get some other legitimate services - video on demand, software on demand? Not sure I like it myself, but surely you can all devote a little more thought to it other than "MS Baaaaad"
I can't wait until the article that says Apple will be doing the same thing comes out.
Watching the MS hatin' Apple apologists squirm is a favorite pasttime of mine.
This is what Microsoft meant when they said they were innovating.
The Mac Mini is $500, which is pretty cheap. Sure you can "build" a cheaper machine, but if you are "building" a Longhorn machine with a $200 retail license of Windows, it isn't less than $500.
I'm sorry, Dell's "low end" that are below $500 quickly become over $500 with basic upgrades...
I buy both Dell "low end" machines and Apple "low end machines."
Right now, the G4 is a bit underpowered for gaming, but runs our business apps no problem. Apple is going to be in a whole new market with x86... largely because they will have decent processors EVERYWHERE.
The performance difference between top-of-the line x86 and "much cheaper" x86 isn't NEARLY as big as the G5/G4 split, so they are going to be in an interesting situation.
Alex
You haven't the balls to do it, Microsoft, because if you do, you'll not be shooting yourself in the foot -- you'll be chopping yourself off at the knees.
If DRM of audio and video media comes to my OS, I will find another OS.
My hope is that Apple will be sensible and avoid making the mistakes Microsoft seems intent on making.
If Apple isn't that clueful, then I'm sure the BSD and Linux communities are.
Because here's the bottom line: OSes are irrelevent now. It's the applications that matter.
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Along with Linux, the biggest competitor to
M$ is old M$ systems which do not get upgraded.
Every time they do something like this they hurt
themselves more, but as a Marketing company they
_cannot_ admit this, and that is a huge clueless
weakness.
What TFA says is that it looks like HDMI/HDCP will become a requirement for watching digital content on PC systems. Microsoft is only adding support for this crap for Windows users that happen to have the corresponding hardware. I can't blame them for that and I can't see how they stand to gain very much. It seems to me that the ones to blame are the greedy content owners and media manufacturers and the ones who really stand to gain are monitor manufacturers since only a small minority of PC monitors sold today seems to have support for this stuff and unless monitor manufacturers offer upgrades to enable you to watch DRM protected material this means people will have to buy new monitors. What really stinks is that I just bought an expensive new 23" LCD monitor. Since I use it alot to watch movies it looks like I will have to scrap it in what? A couple of years? Those greedy sons of b*tches can't be serious about doing forcing N million PC users out there to scrap their monitors and buy new ones?
Only to idiots, are orders laws.
-- Henning von Tresckow
I don't understand. Is hardware (a box conected where the monitor should be) copying really that big a problem that it requires something like this? The two people in the world that actually use a piece of hardware to copy video from a computer would find a way around this wouldn't they? Someone explain this to me.
it's so common amoung those of us who handle large numbers of machine orders, Apple's quality control is absolutely crap.
That will be the last step towards ending my status as a customer who buys premium content then. I guess if I can't play the content I pay for the way it is meant to be played, I will just have to download it.
I hope that one day, those bitches die a horrible, slow and painful death. I have really had it now.
God damn!
Sorry for the french but I am seriously getting annoyed with all that shit.
Instead of being able to look at a beautiful women, she will be replaced in real time with a floating thumbnail of her most conservative picture and a permission slip to date my daughter.
But, thanks to Microsoft earlier that year the permission slip will be based on more flawed Gemini technology (an encrypted SAML message, with a return IP address of 127.12.52.200)
Microsoft is after all the earth women for themselves!
I think the title would be more accurate as "Longhorn to provide the facilities for content providers to require monitor-based DRM". From what I've read, I hardly believe that the OS will not install unless the hardware is present. The summary does a better job, but the title is just sensationalistic.
I once said here that Microsoft dictates all hardware design, that their monopoly is both hardware and software, and I was put down by the slashdot community saying it was rediculous.
Now do you believe me? Every piece of "Longhorn" oriented hardware, which by default will have to be everything, has insane DRM requirements and also insanely useless feature requirements. Both of them waste the hardware companies' time and energy that should be going into better products.
When do we stop letting a software monopoly dictate the standards every hardware company must adhere to? When you look at their stupid Longhorn driver models it's clear they don't belong in the drivers seat of hardware design.
With all the content protection on HD content, I reckon what will happen is, 5-6 years down the line everyone will have told the companies what to do with their HD content, and be using video scalers. Sure, they're not great now, but give them time... with fractal scaling, and using hints from other frames to improve the current frame, I reckon they'll be able to do pretty good job, with a lot less hassle...
If I so chose to upgrade to Longhorn, I'd have to buy a whole new videocard and monitor to actually view the OS and any other programs tailor written for it?
You'll probably need a new videocard for Avalon anyway. But... no. Only to view videos that have been marked so that Windows Media Player requires these capabilities to view them.
However, that may be wuite a lot of videos... Microsoft seems to be getting their contaminated format in as the standard for a depressingly large number of new technologies.
Incorrect: Yo, don't buy that PC, if you do you can't watch these movies cuz you won't have the right monitor.
Correct: Yo, this sucks, I can't watch ANY MOVIES anymore on my old PC because the content providers REQUIRE the new Longhorn OS with DRM, much like alot of websites REQUIRE internet explorer. Wha? How the heck, you are watching that movie!!! How????? - "I got Longhorn baby... and this slick new monitor".
Modesty is one of life's greatest attributes
ATI cards with component video output have a macrovision restriction for protected content. It will not display a dvd above 480p. So, if you want to scale a movie with the computer and display on your hdtv, you have to run a decrypter program.
You can do it in real time w/ dvdidle, or just copy to hard drive and then play.
a) If this doesn't push people to Macs more, I don't know what will.
b) Well, I guess I just bought my last legitimate commercial DVD -- all my future content will come from Plaza in Bangkok, at $2-$3 a pop, to boot. No skin off my back.
Unlike with video, compression waves in air are an easily "user accessible bus". Mike the speakers and you have pwnz0red any sort of Secure Audio Path that Microsoft could ever implement.
Considering how many features were dropped from Longhorn and how this feature being added serves the content providers and not the owner of the computer, i'm assuming the content providers will also pay a significant part of the cost of the O.S., reducing the price to the end user?
"If God created us in his own image we have more than reciprocated." - Voltaire
Duh I meant the number of people capable of freeing content is directly proportional to the difficulty in identifying them... oops :-P
As soon as you need actual hardware to pirate the signal, copying movies becomes a restricted occupation again, just like selling free cable boxes.
No, copying movies the first time becomes a restricted occupation. Once a single unencrypted copy exists, then making a million more is no more difficult than it is today.
Whip out your favorite P2P client, and search for some copyrighted video. Do you see a hundred different rips made by each of the hundred different people sharing a copy? No, you see one or two of the best rips, each with hundreds of identical copies shared, in part because the swarming download protocols and hashing algorithms fundamentally encourage that behavior.
So what difference will in-monitor DRM make? Instead of having a few zealous groups using software to rip tons of movies that are then shared by millions of people, we'll have a few zealous groups using hardware to rip tons of movies that are then shared by hundreds of millions of people.
Wait - why will there be more people sharing these rips? Because most people will own some of the billions of non-DRM-capable monitors in existance, and the moron DRM-using publishers will have thus made it impossible for them to play a full-quality copy of these videos unless they have an illegal copy. Publishers couldn't do anything more stupid if they put a "Download free movies on P2P! It's the best!" advertisement at the start of every show!
Second of all, this means that in order to access their movie content and so on, you'll have to have one of the "special" monitors, but the system will only work through Windows -- it's primarily a software solution which looks for the monitor feature, and fucks up the imagery if it doesn't find it. So, again, Linux remains unaffected.
It does affect linux when you need a special monitor which will require software to allow the screen to render correctly.
This software will be closed, patented, etc. so it won't be easy for the linux community to replicate it.
All new monitors are going to have this software/firmware involved, one way or another, if they havn't already.
After all the hardware companies been in bed with ms all these years.. which is the reason linux is still hard pressed to create drivers.
Make no mistake, ms is planning an all out war against the oss community, and this is just another volley.
If *WE* don't stop it now, keyboards and processors will be next, to the point we won't be able to even say anything (litteraly), unless their 'aproved' by monsters like gates.
-- The InterNet is a terrible thing to waste.. shut down ms & perform a citizens arrest on bill gates & company.
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
...for someone to manufacture a gizmo that sits between your computer and non-DRM monitor and fixes the problem. Or even some software that emulates one.
Just like DVD viewing, can't watch this DVD? - no problem, load this progam and away you go.
When will they ever learn.
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
If DRM of audio and video media comes to my OS, I will find another OS.
Great. You and the other 3 zealots can all get together and throw yourselfs an OS-conversion party.
Because here's the bottom line: OSes are irrelevent now. It's the applications that matter.
Sell Grandma Betsy, or Aunt Shirley on this (or, Bubba Joe) and then get back to me on that statement.
In theory I agree with everything you've said. The problem is that 95% of all Windows users are clueless buffoons with no REAL "Digital Integrity". They don't care that much about DRM or the fact that the content-producers are slowly tightening a noose around their necks. Just keep playing that same stupid Britney song on the radio over and over, and give them another dose of dumb-fuck "Reality TV" to watch and they're happy.
-This sig intentionally left blank
Most of the pieces are being put in place (Wine, OpenOffice, etc) but Linux and MacOS X would do well be fully ready for that moment.
All they want to do is make sure video/3D professionals don't use Longhorn.
This way it's clear as cristal...
I think, therefore I am...I think.
So far from what Microsoft is letting the public in on, it looks like Longhorn is going to be Windows XP with less "features" and some new themes that can already be found for XP for free if you know where to look.
To me, this is a step backwards in technology (giving us less than we have today as far as video is concerned).
If this monitor thing manages to make it into the final release, it alone will be enough to make me ignore longhorn's existence completely. I'm hoping monitor manufacturers won't cooperate.
The RIAA and MPAA need to stop their bitching and stay the hell away from computers with their meddling! Places like the Internet are supposed to be free places, unrestricted by others like the government and companies influence over other companies!
DRM is the bane of my existence! It needs to be stopped. A world without it isn't significantly hurting anyone, but a world with it is going to feel ridiculously restricted as compared to what we're currently used to.
... you'll have to convert it to RGB at some point. When you do, your "premium content" can be recorded by any half-competent pirate.
Ultimately hardware options are not a solution pirates can use, since watermarking could easily identify which person freed some content from DRM.
Unless, of course, that content is ever sold for cash, like every video on the racks at every store from Best Buy to Walmart. Will popular videos all start going "direct-to-internet" any time soon? I doubt it. Publishers may talk a big talk about how much money they estimate they lose from piracy, but when they have to put that estimate up against the amount they know they'll lose from keeping their products out of every big retail outlet in the world, I doubt it'll seem so huge.
Why don't they just cut to the chase and produce DRM-enabled eyeglasses for us to wear?
Sounds like something from the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation. "Joo Janta Intellectual Property Sensitive Sunglasses".
And this is yet another reason on the already teemingly high mound of issues supporting my move to 100% Linux.
I will not buy an OS that cripples abilities the previous version had. (watching movies, etc!)
I will not buy a monitor that my current one outperforms. (no DRM in my 20" CRT!)
I will not have a limited "product lifecycle" for patches and support.
I will not pay for an OS, nor it's Kernel.
I will only buy the most robust product available. Hardware or software. Regardless of new features if any, this is a giant step backwards because it promotes scarcity in a platform of boundless possibility.
Intel and MS are screwed if they keep conforming to every pelvic thrust of the MPAA/RIAA/etc.
Back in the day (mid-90's), I had an old 486DX2/66 with an ATI All-in-Wonder card and a Hollywood MPEG decoder board. My parents wanted to copy DVD's to VHS in order to watch them on different equipment. I was able to defeat the Macrovision crap by piping the output from the MPEG decoder over some proprietary ATI Multimedia Bus (I think that's what it was called) and then out to a VCR over composite RGB. It worked great. I wasn't doing anything illegal AFAIK, but I'm sure the copyright holders didn't want people to be able to do that.
No they won't. Not even the /. readers go out of their way to avoid proprietary implementations of things that don't need to be there. Lots of them use proprietary software (Microsoft Windows and MacOS X, most notably) and patent-encumbered formats (such as MP3, as you mentioned) instead of technically superior Ogg Vorbis which is not encumbered and is available to everyone freely. Most DVD viewers I know have no idea what region coding is, much less how to disable or alter region coding on their DVD players.
/. readers, there's no reason to believe it won't work on less adept mass audiences.
It's a matter of convincing users that some nifty feature comes with the system and taking on these restrictions (if they're mentioned at all) are the only way to get those features.
This is the path by which users are being lured away from pursuing their software freedom and if it works on the most technically-adept
Digital Citizen
This is so frustrating. Windows is becoming more and more of a lockdown, but I just don't see other viable options. Mod me troll, but Linux just isn't ready for the desktop, even for me (applications don't "just work", and nobody's heard of "usability"), and Macs are far too expensive. Windows really, really, really sucks, but there are no better options for most people.
http://ablegray.com
Hello Apple. After seeing my buddy's Dual G5 2.7s and hearing that the intel version of Macs are impressing developers with their speed, I think my next computer will be a Mac.
The Doormat
If you're not outraged, then you're not paying attention.
Why oh why couldn't we take the cash spent on the research of this POS DRM technology, and put it into researching Kickass Monitor (TM) technology. Seriously, a similar amount of time and money could develop a noticably better display if applied to any number of hardware/software pieces. Net effect: customer buys new monitor. However, in one case it is because they want to, because they are impressed with what they get. On the other hand, they are being beaten into buying it like, a dog with a rolled up newspaper...
get it right dubass
Something that I think is interesting to notice: a so-called feature that is of absolutely *no interest* to the end-user (who, guess what, is the actual customer). Isn't that weird that some company can pull off this kind of crap? Adding features to a product that are in fact against the customer's own interest? What does it add for the customer? Annoyance and no added benefit. How can Microsoft get away with that, commercially speaking?
My take on this is that they do not care much about the end-user of their products. They seem to care more about all the companies that they can work with, directly or indirectly, and which probably make them a lot more money at the end of the day. To me, this explains all the hype around DRM, and also all the security issues that revolved around Internet Explorer. These actually benefit to some. But the "some" are not the end customers...
You know what? This is reminding me of what the TV media has become. The end-user (people actually watching TV) don't directly make the TV channels any money. This is all indirect through advertisement and such... so the end-user matters a lot less than with other types of businesses. As long as there many to watch, it's all good. And I see the Windows phenomenon as exactly similar to that...
Don't consume DRM'd content.
... well, you can only blame yourself for encouraging the blood-sucking bastards.
There's an absolute ton of free content out there, but the quality is in general pretty poor. If it got more support, it would get better.
On the other hand, if you just can't bear to close yourself off from all that pretty DRM'd stuff that you're being fed
Does anyone remember when computers and computer companies didn't suck?
Me neither.
Why do they suddenly decide to start pushing DRM when we've got millions of perfectly good monitors in use. The monitor manufacturers should be the ones phasing in DRM, NOT your OS. You want to get protection; fine build it into your monitor and start selling it.
Good luck with that! Cause no one will bite.
Instead M$ is doing their work for them. And in the process will cost consumers millions of dollars worth of new monitors.
I smell collusion!
What's next, security-enabled mice/keyboards.
Oh no, you can't use that keyboard, its not 'secure' enough to run IE!
Yes, tis true. We are the future!
The part of this whole thing that slashdotters are failing to realize is that Longhorn will, at best, be out in another year, at which point the current series of motherboards, videocards, etc will be more or less obsoleted against runnig the current generation of eye-candy rich OS's. The move towards 64-bit, PCI express, dual-core technology, etc is taking hold so fast that the current generation of PC's won't stand much of a chance of running Longhorn at a reasonable speed anyway, regardless of the resolution of content you're attempting to play back. Furthermore, the increased "cost" of a "new" monitor is nearly insignificant when you consider that corporations like Dell give the monitors away with system purchases. The linux debate is nearly mute by default since almost everything practically has to be reverse engineered to run on Linux anyway, you're lucky if you can even get the latest quicktime versions running (and that takes work, not out of the box) so I'm assuming that the new high resolution content we're bickering about won't be mereley limited to a new monitor for Linux users.
In short, in a nation where:
I bought my car but the government says I can't drive it at more than 65 MPH on the freeway,
I bought my house and land but the government wants taxes for its use,
I bought my gun but I can't hunt birds in the city I live in,
it seems a little naive that we're whining that the media industry wants us to watch our computer-based content on our computer.
Finding new and fun ways to waste CPU cycles since...
So now when you copy insert cool anime show here from your machine to a CD/DVD, you become a hacker. I guess that designation carries no meaning at all anymore.
This whole model is pretty frightening. The content provider can determine what monitor I need to watch the content that I paid for? Say goodbye Microsoft. The Bend Me Over Some More Express has just left!
My grandmother has already announced that she'll implement a crack by herself until August.
I told her that we will have crack by tonight, but she seems to be very stubborn, and want to do this anyway.
Besides, it's a very sunny day outside.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Then apple will never play movies on HD optical media, both bluray and HDCD WILL require secured video out. So apple not implementing a secure video out is unrealistic, take you fanboyism elsewhere.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
It's not enough that the majority of installed PCs probably don't have the horsepower to run Longhorn, now M$ wants to force people to buy new peripherals. I hate to compare them to Apple, but I was using the old OS 9 on an old computer that wouldn't run OS X. So, I bought a used B&W G3, plugged in my ADB keyboard and a beige, Performa-era monitor, and installed OS X 10.3 which runs flawlessly. The OS was literally more expensive than the computer.
M$, on the other hand, would force me to buy a new monitor in addition to a faster computer to view content that I'VE ALREADY PAID FOR? Once again, I'm having difficulty seeing Windows as a value added product.
Make love, not reality television.
A thought occurred to me after reading a few comments about, "Why do it in the monitor?" I bought my first computer for myself back in February of 2000. Since then, I have upgraded everything several times, except the monitor! In fact, my current primary personal computer uses only the monitor from my original 2000 purchase and nothing else. Everything, including the mouse, keyboard and harddrives, has been replaced by newer and better products. I actually added a new monitor to my setup three months ago, but kept the old 19" 2000 monitor and hooked it up to the VGA port on my Radeon 9800 Pro so I can run dual-monitors. Honestly, I have never really thought about getting rid of my old monitor since it has held up so well over the past 5 years. So I'm thinking, what if this is an attempt to stir up the monitor market? In my opinion, the monitor is the least likely part of a computer package to be upgraded. Even at work (4000 employees), we still have these old 17" screens from 97-99, but our boxes have been upgraded at least twice since then. I, of course, could be totally wrong, but I just wanted to throw it out there. =D
Plug and play monitors can already send their capabilities to the host, so it's not unreasonable that they'll extend the spec to include digital signatures.
This technology is about the functional control of WHAT content you see, not just IF you SEE it or not.
So depending on social class, skin color, race, age, sexual preference you may end up seeing different content than your neighbor based solely on the type of hardware you purchased
You might say "No!" laws exist on the books to prevent that kind of racist discrimination!
I say you are deluded and must be in the US or a country like the US, most of the rest of the world has no such public covenant / contract / constitution against discrimination.
Its a mandatory access control (operated by people with many different Axes to grind) on the input (what you can click) and output paths of the display( What you can see) and sound.
This has incredible potential to subtly be abused.
And Not so subtly, if you buy a monitor made in china for Chinese, guess what, INSTANT Censorship so easy the Chinese government only has to ban non Chinese monitors from their markets.
Not to mention adding and mixing content, like all American news outlets have content distorted (as in re-written in real time)
Also automatic redlining, no more will neighborhoods have to PUT up with the wrong crowd making a home in the elite posh suburbs because they wont be able to find the houses unless they have l33t equipment.
Banks don't need to worry about writing loans they don't want to over the net, insurance companies can filter you out by buying lists of Serial numbers that are likely in hurricane ravaged areas.
The potential abuses of this bright shiny new technology are limitless.
Not to mention guaranteed delivery of SPAM to your desktop etc.
If Bill freaking Gates wants to do the world a favor he will quickly get a list of the supporters of this "Feature" and squash them and this like the Bug that it is.
And comparing the abuse potential of this new DRM feature to the relatively benign abuse potential of the patriot act is like comparing a faithful alter boy to Darth Vader and Hitler combined into one.
--
Anakin Skywalker is a serial child killer, and everyone who plays an Imperial type on Star Wars Galaxies has a serial child killer as a Hero figure and role model
So now DRM is basically written in the monitor. Next, an advancement for additional security--the monitor will actually be able to transmit and receive video simultaneously, and trained professionals on the other end will take pirates away even before _they_ realize that they're pirates!
(Apologies to Douglas Adams)
Zeb Horkulon: So you're telling me that the reason my picture looks like a magnified cubist painting is because my projection system isn't compatible with Windows?
MS Marketing Drone: Well... that's not it really. Your display is sort of compatible but only as long as it doesn't provide a sharp image when watching premium content. We can't have that since it would be all too easy for you to then archive the image to unauthorized deivces.
Zeb Horkulon: So my Maxivid 4000 photon cannon virtual screen that can provide me with beautiful desktop displays at 10,000 x 24,842 resolution will do so as long as I'm only running Word, Powerpoint or Excel. But as soon as I try to stream in some HDTV from the net or play a DVD I have to watch this wretched blow up of a pixel sized image?
MS Marketing Drone: Yes! You actually understand the concept! That's marvellous!
Zeb Horkulon: [GETTING NOTICEABLY ANNOYED] But why!!?
MS Marketing Drone: The model of your display was "hacked" last month by some pirates to enable copying of the video stream to unauthorized devices. You can blame it on them. They're the bastards, after all.
Zeb Horkulon: I only bought it four months ago! This is ridiculous!!!
MS Marketing Drone: No. It's not ridiculous. It's just another method insuring that we are protecting the intellectual property of the various copyright holders. That's progress. Ain't it grand??
Zeb Horkulon: Hrrrmph! Next, I suppose you'll be telling me that my eyes are unauthorized devices!
MS Marketing Drone: Heyyyy... That's a great idea!!!
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Not every new PC comes with a monitor. There would HAVE to be a disclaimer stating that if you buy this PC without a monitor that you might not be able to use the one you already have. Which is BULL. I think consumers will look at that disclaimer and say it's bull too. If they don't put a disclaimer on and people take their new PCs home and find it won't work on their existing monitor, people will be PISSED. They will sue, and rightfully so.
The problem is that these restrictions do not have enough exposure into the mainstream, even when it concerns TV.
Where was the uprising over commercial skip features in ReplayTV? What about the broadcast flag?
These "security features" will be slipped in, with people unaware, until they want to do something that is not allowed (like skipping previews on DVDs). Then they will be stuck with it, and may very well accept it as "how things are."
As long as there will be one-way DRM system, there will always be a by-pass to it.
With "one-way" I mean that all I need to enjoy contents is in my hands with no extarnal third party involved. As it happens with DVDs on a PC!
A two-ways DRM system involves real time data exchange with a third party for authorisation. And this would make (just) more difficult the by-pass. As it happens with cellular telephony.
In my humble opinion.
Maybe Computers will never be as intelligent as Humans.
For sure they won't ever become so stupid. [VR-1988]
"... "If I tried to get away with it," said George, "then other people'd get away with it and pretty soon we'd be right back to the dark ages again, with everybody competing against everybody else. You wouldn't like that, would you?"
b .html
"I'd hate it," said Hazel.
"There you are," said George. "The minute people start cheating on laws, what do you think happens to society?"
Harrison Bergeron
by Kurt Vonnegut (1961)
--http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/h
As time goes by I agree more and more with RMS regarding "free" software. This is just one more very strong reason to only use free software! http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/why-free.html
OK. THe orginal was a joke... but it makes me think of another point. I like in London. The news sources I use are primary the BBC, reuters and occasionally CNN. I can no longer stand most American news sorces any more. They go crazy bat shit everytime some 18 year old gets kidnapped but dont really seem to report that much when another bomb goes of in Basra.
I was surfing around the place on the 7th and watching BBC as many Londoners where. Occasionally Id read or watch a stream of american versions of the London Bombs. Its was like bum ba dum bum... with trumpets and serious handsome men and women with great hair saying stupid things about how London and Londoners would react. It was all "Its the UKs 9/11". Its was just stupid(Londons been thru a shit load worse than this), repeative and mostly, wrong. The BBC etc(hell even Sky news) were informative and for the most part reflected reality. American stations take these occasional trips to neverland.
How long until someone puts together a little box with video-in and video-out that identifies itself as "New Fangled Monitor" to Longhorn and then passes the video through to your old monitor?
You were 80% angel, 10% demon. The rest was hard to explain. - Over The Rhine
"Math in a song is good."-Linford
If they start forcing these restrictions on people they will look elsewhere.
There are a lot of inexperienced users out there who aren't ripping media and they will be turned off by such technology.
When you start fuzzing things up, having stupid protection schemes, DRM etc you only inconvience the average law abiding citizen as those who are clever enough to crack the protection will not see any of the protection.
This is one more nail in the coffin of Windows.
The problem I see with all this DRM crap is that maybe, just maybe someone WON'T come up with a crack or won't make it public (similar to the current Adobe EBX eBook exchange format). This would have the same effect as making all the geeks in the world into Avg. Joe's.
As far as Linux, expect that it won't work at all unless someone can manage to find a crack to unprotect content.
There's tons of things people have been cracking these days. Take DVD copyright protection. They've cracked that. I don't see why someone wouldn't find a way to crack this.
monitor watches you!
Please be more specific: Missing content or looks like barf?
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
But like others have said, how many non-geeks do you know that would buy a new OS and install it on a computer they already have? Not many. It would sadly be a fairly smooth rollover considering the potential concequences.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Will it be implemented as strictly as this.
Will this affect 500+ GB *ripped and _reencoded_* .avi Video Libraries? I mean, I hear some people have them...
Not I, of course. Just sayin'...
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
Obviously you're entitled to your opinion. But let's just be clear that this is not the approach taken by US (or most other nations, AFAIK) copyright law. The entire concept of copyright was based on the idea that content is "different". A book is a product, a CD is a product, a painting is a product. But story, the music, the image, respectively, are not products. They are information. Information can be reproduced with trivial effort. But transcribing a usable, re-usable, distributable copy of the information was, until the advent of the VCR, prohibitively difficult/tedious. Possible, yes, but tedious. What this meant was that few people actually attempted to do such, to circumvent the creator's right of sole reproduction and distribution (AKA copyright). But when they did, there was a legal channel by which the creator could protect his right. "Unfair" forms of reproduction are what copyright was designed to protect. How can an artist make a living from his work if he has to compete with someone else to sell it who doesn't need to spend any time practicing, composing, or performing, and instead can sit and crank out copies all day long. The digital age brought about the triviality of reproduction and distribution of information. Which means that virtually anyone can now do so with virtually no effort, or even technical knowledge. You don't need to buy heavy equipment or expensive ad space in order to copy and distribute. But that doesn't change the fact that each instance of this is a violation of the creator's sole right to reproduction and distribution. Each instance is an infringement of the copyright. But that shouldn't be the final word. One must keep in mind the spirit of the law. Was it ever intended to prevent people from obtaining a copy and making use of that copy as many times as they want, in whatever ways they want, short of copying it for further distribution? Arguably, no. I would argue that any attempt to claim that a consumer should pay for each and every use, or even just multiple copies for different presentation devices, is unabashed money-grubbing. It is equivalent, in my mind, to an artist claiming grounds to sue you for reading his book aloud to your children-- or even just to yourself-- in the privacy of your home. Or an author claiming grounds to sue you for playing his song, on your piano, alone, again in the privacy of your home..... Unless you've paid for the license to do so. I don't think there's a valid argument that this is the type of profiteering that copyright was meant to protect. So the next question is, should we redesign copyright law to serve this purely commercial/economic purpose, as the **AA's seem to want? Or do we lobby to get back to the spirit of the law, and renew the principles of fair use? It should be obvious by this point where I stand, at least.
Adding this sort of stupidity to the OS GUARANTEES it's going to be a nearly useless bloated insecure unreliable POS.
As if we didn't already know that based on how many features previously promised have had to be REMOVED from the specs.
Oh, wait, my XP Pro just said it has "recovered from a serious error" and wants to send a message to Bill - without telling me what the error was of course. Unless you think:
Error code 000000ea, parameter1 8197b138, parameter2 82134b38, parameter3 822f00e8, parameter4 00000001.
actually means something to somebody.
It said:
For more information, see Help and Support Center at http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp.
So I did.
Got "Page cannot be displayed."
Thanks, Bill, real helpful.
Meanwhile you're gonna make sure I can't see a copied DVD I made for a backup, right? Gee, I'm so looking forward to Longhorn.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
just require that the entire machine be sealed in epoxy with no I/O connections? And you have to wear Microsoft goggles and headsets to see the picture and hear the sound?
What?
How hard would it be to build a dongle to insert between the computer and any existing monitor, video distributor, KVM, or recorder, that would mimic the response sent to the computer by these new DRM enabled monitors? I'd bet it will be pretty simple. ...
...
Computer: "Hey monitor, are you DRM safe?"
*dongle intercepts and responds on monitor's behalf*
Dongle: "Yes, I'm the new S0ny SE770LCDRM!"
Computer: "Oh, ok, then in that case, here's your
unrestricted HD video feed."
*dongle passes video feed through to untainted hardware*
Besides, you could probably implement it as a hacked device driver, the method by which many hardware dongle software protection schemes have been circumvented.
I'm not scared. I'm bored. I've got my IDE open and my soldering iron warming up as we speak. And I doubt I'm alone on this.
Just look at the superior copy protection of modern video gaming consoles... *cough* modchip *cough*
It seems like all these copy protection efforts do is create niche businesses designed to bypass them. I better file to get a tax license...
Pretty soon, computers will not have a video port, and they'll be bundled with the monitor as an all-in-one unit. Maybe Apple will come out with this... *cough, again*
That's just my stream of thoughts...
-@
For one, exposure is higher for media-related issues on the mac platform. Apple has been courted by video editors, graphic designers and artists for a long time.
Many of these folks may not know an USB hub from a torque converter, but they are surprisingly aware of media-related issues. Plus, the apple community is currently far more tight-knit than the windows community (how many casual mac users still read mac rumor sites, for example? Many!). Word of this sort of thing would spread quickly.
This might change in the future, but it wouldn't fly today, nor in the immediate future.
Slashdot. It's Not For Common Sense
This won't work for one big reason: Institutional buyers. As it is, colleges and universities have huge numbers of older computers they still use. Where I am, these machines range from 400 - 1 GHz in speed, and they all run XP Pro. For the record, I use 400 mHz XP Pro machine on a regular basis, and while it's a little bit slow, it runs just fine.
While Universities have many new machines, in a few years (when Longhorn finally comes out), they will be old, and replacing the current old crop of computers.
What I'm getting at, is these computers already have existing monitors, and schools are not going to replace the (often onboard) video cards and monitors so that they can access the latest DRM encrypted educational content.
So, MS has one of two options 1. Not implement this at all. or 2. Take it out of 'fleet' copies of Longhorn.
Being that current institutional copies do not have the registration requirements mandated by the home buyers copies, I suspect that MS will pick option 1. However, up until now, only the tech guys really are aware of what is and isn't in the institutional copies... now it will affect regular users.
At this point, someone will have to explain why students, faculty, and employees at businesses with large amounts of older machines can access restricted content at work on older computers with 14 inch CRTs, but not at home on 18 inch LCDs.
I swear the instinct to buy the more expensive option and feel proud of it is one of mankind's strongest instincts.
...and yes, I *am* preaching at you -- all of you who fall into this trap. And I'm just as guilty of it as anyone too, so I'm also preaching to the man in the mirror.
You're absolutely right, it is one of man's strongest instincts right alongside the need to eat, survive and reproduce. It is fundamentally built into the design of human beings by God who designed us with an inherent need to worship, but since He also gave us free will, some of us will choose to worship Him, which was His intent, but unfortunately most of us prefer to worship things instead, and our pride also makes us want to desire to be "worshipped" by our fellow man in the form of impressing them with our buying power and extravagent tastes. What a bunch of depraved losers we actually are. We should all make it a point to spend our money more wisely and if we want to impress someone with our wealth and tastes, we should instead brag about how many how many people we've helped with our money instead of what toys we've bought to gratify ourselves.
You know, the one who is supposed to be always right, or mostly right. It's obviously not the end user anymore. Typically a copy of Windows is purchased by guys who make the PC, so it's not really up to the end user to concern himself with these things. So MS cuts a deal with Dell, and cuts a deal with a consortium of content providers and the vast majority of the people don't know a thing until their computer tells them they can't do something. With the exception of better USB support in newer systems. I have no qualms with continuing to use Win 98 SE.
The whole thing is a war of egos over a market which doesn't exist. Who really wants to intercept video going to their monitor anyway? DVD sales are dropping in general because the sad reality is that for all the movies produced in a year, damn few are worth watching once, never mind more than once. The whole idea probably stems from the idea that if you don't prove you are defending your copyright, you lose it. This is just another frontier on which you have to prove you are defending your copyright. I think it's pretty obvious from X-Box sales that Microsoft isn't going to own the living room in our lifetimes. So they should develop a better strategy for holding the office before somebody makes Linux palatable enough for the masses.
Big OS is the same damn thing as Big government. To get the 1% you want you have to finance the 99% you don't want. If Microsoft is going to keep developing for the interests of people other than the end user, they should really just give the OS out. There has to be an end to how much you can force people to buy upgrades that have nothing they want in them. You may be able to mess with ignorance of the home user, but small business owners tend to get pissed being charged something for nothing over and over. I know a lot of shops that still use old Windows variants and even a few DOS shops. They don't even think about it until they try and add a workstation and get some crap like XP pre-installed.
When DRM starts really hitting users in the face, they will look for alternatives, or just look away. None of this amounts to a serious business model for content providers, because they really haven't been putting nearly as much effort into the content as they have into the delivery systems. Their sloth is coming home to roost, and all the DRM in the world isn't going to save them.
...but isn't this just another good reason to buy something other than Windows?
Time is comparison of movement to other movement.
In Microsoft's white paper on Output Protection:
t _protect.mspx/
"This paper discusses the mechanisms to protect against hardware attacks when playing premium content that are planned for the Microsoft® Windows®"
So what I want to know is, when was the last time you were attacked by your hardware?
Here is a link to the white paper - http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/device/stream/outpu
For obviouse reasons.
One: it's capitalism that gives rise to this abuse of people and the economies of the world.
Two: Capitalism & Communism BOTH are cut from the same cloth.
The proof can be seen in that they both tend to gravitate all of the wealth and power to just a handful of scum bags (like gates).
-- The InterNet is a terrible thing to waste.. close down microsoft and arrest gates & company immediately.
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
Start buying up stock in monitor/panel manufacturers and profit off of this. Oh hell I said the noexistant p word of the linux world profit, guess that won't happen. Nm go back to bitching how linux should rule the world.
That's DRM'ed but not so restictively that consumenr can object to it.
I guess M$ won't be the only game in town when the theatre chains reap what they sowed in the multiplexes. And they'll be followed by the studios, who are paying for care and feeding of the **AA's (No they don't make any money from the consumer! Would YOU pay for somebody to tell you "No you can't watch that. We couldn't make enough money off of you. We wanna get paid.")
The first store that carries video in an iTunes like (720i or 1080i) downloadable, DRMed video wil wipe out the traditional distribution channels with their time and media shifting capabilities.
Right now, the studios are waiting and shaking in their boots over the first release of content without any involvement from them.
Independent lenses will be truly independent when they can produce their content and sell it directly to the comsumer.
No more begging for some media exec.s judgement.
No more canceled TV shows unless they are devoid of socially redeeming content and don't find an audience capable of supporting them on their own merit.
No more crap being foisted on us because they can get the same number of eyeballs for cheaper. (The real audience for that crap shifts from the advertisers to the consumers.)
Imagine being able to watch what you want, when you want, as much as you want, without incongruous interruptions.
Imagine being able to produce what you want, sell as much of it as you can, without having to be beholding to a bunch of exec.s who don't know, and don't want to know, about it but only care how much money they can make of of it.
"The exec.s are getting nervous," "you'll never be able to convince some soulless schmuck that a particular show needs to be made" and "Can you do it cheaper?" will no longer a justification for editing content out of production.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
Ultimately hardware options are not a solution pirates can use, since watermarking could easily identify which person freed some content from DRM.
Watermarking in what? It sounds like you're thinking of "trusted computing". But all that would tell you would be that, ah, yes, it was reported stolen yesterday by a 95-year-old Chinese grandmother.
And even if you can identify the actual individual who copied the media and uploaded the first copy onto the internet, what good's it going to do you when you find out they live somewhere you don't have an extradition treaty with, or even somewhere which doesn't recognise international copyright law?
Sooner or later these people are going to have to accept that it's going to be very hard to stuff this cat back in the bag without getting some pretty vicious scratches.
Tell you what, guys, how about we do a deal? You come up with a business model that lets me buy what I want, when I want, and I'll buy stuff. You force me to buy what I can find, when I have time to drive out to the mall, and I won't. It's really and truly that simple. I've bought... let's see... about seven computer games this year. And fully five of those were download purchases. Low prices, no waiting for delivery, no expensive international shipping charges, and more of my money going straight to the people who actually created the content. I win. They win. What's so hard about this?
Actually, OS X does have DRM buried deep inside it. I discovered this when writing some utility software.
/dev/ files are then unlocked, and you can read the DVD normally.
Specifically, OS X will refuse to give you access to the files on DVD media, if the DVDs are protected with CSS. You can't even read the raw device file; you just get zeros and read errors.
However, if you run the Apple DVD Player application, it does something undocumented, and the
It looks as if the VLC folks have reverse-engineered around this DRM--but nevertheless, it does exist, as can trivially be verified with a 10 line C program.
So if BluRay demands DRM, I for one believe Apple will comply 100%.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
I wish the supermarkets would go back to having plain white cartons simply labelled in black letters "MILK"... and plain white cans simply labelled "BEER", and plain white boxes simply labelled "CEREAL", etc.
Anybody ever see 'Repo Man'?
The only way to escape from that DRM hell is with the artists / musicians / film-makers / book-writers, etc... The day the Source will want their creations to spread without restrictions, everything will be fine again.
I am a musician, and I will take that step and encourage everyone I know to do it too. Real artists don't want to live in a DRM jail. If you produce "content", please think about it.
Just yesterday I suffered 6 hours, reconfiguring hardware several times, reinstalling windows a couple of times. It turned out that a 256 MB RAM stick was not working properly. The funny thing is that linux word without any problem whatsoever... despite the fact that it was an a hard-drive transplanted from another computer.
On my home computer, Windows XP installation CDs do not boot. That's right. The experience ceases before it ever begins. No further steps there.
Of course, I had no trouble installing linux or using a large array of Linux LiveCDs.
As for applications not being right and usability being terrible...
But here I go:
OpenOffice ~= Microsoft Office
Firefox ~= Internet Explorer
K3B is easier to use than any windows burner I've used (EasyCD, Roxio, Nero)
KDE ~= Windows Interface
MPlayer plays more formats (including DVDs) than Windows Media Player and Real Player combined
and the list goes on and on and on...
So if linux is not ready for the desktop "even for you", then perhaps part of the issue is that you aren't as knowledgable with computers as you think you are.
Akarsz Magyar Gentoo fórumot? Akkor
Disclaimer: I'm a Tier 1 AppleCare rep, but hardly a mac fanboy.
A quick perusal of Dell's website (which, btw, is a UI nightmare) shows that the cheapest desktop model they have is a Dimension 2400, which starts at $299 (normally $374 but they're on sale right now). This machine comes with a 40GB HD, 256 MB RAM, 2.4 GHz Celeron processor (ha!), onboard intel graphics chipset, and a 17" monitor. Oh, don't forget the 32-64 MB of shared video memory for that onboard video. So 1/8-1/4 of your RAM is used up right out of the box. Not to mention the XP RAM usage footprint.
You say not to compare it to a mac mini... why not? It comes with the same amount of hard drive space, same amount of RAM, and a somewhat comparable processor. Not to mention the fact that any Mac you buy now comes with 10.4 preloaded, which pretty much has all of the bells and whistles MS keeps promising for their *eventual* release of Longhorn.
Also, let's not forget that Apple bundles the iLife suite, which includes video and audio production software. Granted, they are not the most powerful programs in the genre, but show me a Dell that comes with comparable software bundled out of the box.
Even if Apple is not the right thing for you, that's no reason to say that it's not right for someone else. Especially for a new user, considering Apple's tech support is pretty much accepted to be the best in the industry. Compare this to Dell, where you're lucky to get someone you understand when you call them.
Also, please provide further clarification of your statement "OS X is UNIX for morons". Considering that you can completely bypass the GUI if you wish, and can run X apps if you have X11 installed, and can get packages with Fink, I'd say it's hardly UNIX for morons.
Yeah, they charge a little more for their computers. The Mac mini is (IMHO) the sexiest consumer computer available on the market (from a purely aesthetic standpoint). I still have my PC, and it's ugly and grey, but it works. So does my Mac, it just happens to be a lot prettier (not to mention my PC sounds like a jet engine compared to the mini). I have the option of XP, OS X, and Ubuntu between the computers I have. I find myself using OS X primarily at this point.
Methinks you just fall into the group that is the antithesis of mac fanboys: anti-mac fanboys.
Just like driving a car:
(D) to go forward
(R) to go backward
Bush has better things to do than concern himself with some little slashdot retard buing an illegal cable box. It's far cheaper to send you to Guantanamo for life, but he won't - he just doesn't give a fuck what little shits like you do.
Make the analogy. A monitor is similar to a TV. What can happen to one can happen to the other. I know it a stupid and bad analogy, but Joe User won't know the difference. If Joe's TV is threatened, maybe he'll finally act about the monitor.
You mean if their TV rights are threatened like this?
As an aside, I would like to see someone who can't differentiate between a HD and SD picture. I can understand being confused between EDTV marketing hoo ha, but you think joe SP can't tell the difference in a side by side comparison of 1080i and 480i on well calibrated monitors? The problem is getting that in your local Best Buy is tough...
Is the RIAA really that stupid?
No matter that DRM or digital protection they come up with, its bound to be bypassed. Someone will most likely crack this system within two weeks of release.
But lets imagine it does not get cracked, for a minute. Lets imagine we have a smart someone that wants to rip a DVD from this "protected" format into a Divx encoded video. There are numerous ways to do this. All he has to do is to get a way to sneak into the stream at some point or another. The video has to be displayed, after all, and if it can be displayed on your computer, that means it must also get unencrypted on your computer.
In the worst case, it could be possible to rip videos by hacking directly into the electronics of the monitor, and then re-encoding that as a digital video signal in order to rip the movie. As long as you can see it, its also possible to rip it. Period.
Thanks for sticking up for your loyal customers!
it doesnt work as you have described...
the gfx-card/driver doesnt ask if the other side do drm and then send plaintext-signal... now where would the use of drm be there...
drm here for video processing means the signal is encrypted all the way right up to the monitor chipset itself and only there gets decoded and the pixels light up.....
no way to intercept before the chipset... maybe there are some hardware hackers who can extract the signal right before it goes to the display-panel itself
or just build your own "fake"-monitor with these drm/monitor-industry chipset and then simply add some apis or interfaces where you can framegrab or copy the bits of the pixels...
whatever... there will be a solution for this too, but it wont be that easy...
but the best solution would still be the customers not buying shit that the industry comes up with every time....
this world is a greedy and evil place, and only cos of the masses and normal people not caring and doing anything about the evil....
guess who said this last sentence?
it was albert einstein......
I'd like to comment on this article, but I can't see it because its my monitor isn't secure enough ...
this doesn't fuck up my porn, they can do whatever they want with it.
what MS is doing is not needed.
there is no law making them do this at all.
so they are voluntarily stripping your rights and such at the behest of other companies rather than their consumers.. tell me if that is not collusion and the reason why monopolies are not good?
tell you the truth.. i dont care anymore..
the masses are being pinched.. and DVD is a MASS media.. the more that can buy the more you make. except the only peoples incomes that have increased (in real terms) in the past 20 years are the top 10%.. with offshoring and with nafta, and cafta people cant afford it.. its why DVD sales are slumping...
the issue here is that if MS continues to ignore that now there are other operating systems and such, and that doing things against your clients only works when you are a monopoly...
even if these things wont work at all in linux, its still better..
i am getting to the point that i am trying to teach my freinds to go out, lets take pics, lets see a free show in the park, go skating , read under the trees..
the entertainment industry forgets that they ALSO compete with those things too.. and when their price performance is too high given your ROI in satisfaction, you shift to other things that do that. the sad part is that with such shitty movies, and so many crappy remakes, the population may just 'discover' that those things are actually a lot more fun than the movies are now...
the other thing is that this is a money maker in other ways. that DVM will not be robust, despite what it seems like. why? because, when someone cracks it, and beats it, then they will change it and we all will have to buy new monitors and TVs as they are not software upgradable, nor do they want to be! in fact nothing stops them from 'improving' it anyway and doing this every ccouple of years.
i have a 21 inch autocad workstation with hige res and color correction on a cathode flat screen. better color and such for the graphics and what not. i spend more than 3000 when that was new in 1999.. it still runs sweet, has no burn in (i have been a sofware engineer for more than 20 years and other things). i am NOT going to bother with this...
you know what i will do instead.
say fuck it.. wait three months and watch it with my normal cable!!!!!!!
if they think that a blurry version is ok for us to watch they just proved that yuo dont care as much about HD as they stress!!!
screw it.. i will wait.. and if i dont have that i will watch something else. if it really is that good and i want it.. i will pay the 2.99-3.99 pay per view fee..
bottom line is that only really good films are worth $4!!!!!!!!!!!!!! or less... (and the medium of storage is not worth the other $12-$26!)
the drivel they make is not worth more, and certainly not worth 500 a year (amortizing the monitors) extra to see!!!
but to be FAIR, though i dont know why..
MS is probably making the decision based on the recording and movie industry.
if MS does not comply then windows boxes will not be able to play ANY movies and such, becasue the code was a work for hire of the recording industry and movie industry.
MS is making the decision that people wont by the new operating system without this, or fewer will. however DVDs are not the major reason i buy a computer...
basically the recording industry is playing a dangerous game. they are saying "either you comply with us, or you dont get ANY entertainment"
if we take the threat, we lose...
there will always be wealthier people that dont care, so we are already sold out.
screw em though...
I have never thought of buying a street DVD, but may start in purpose. in fact the ONLY dvd i have ever bought was the first lord of the rings movie... but when they decided to screw me i didnt by the rest. how did they screw me, easy, they then came out with richer better editions, and i realized that if i buy the others soon and not wait 5 years i will get less for my money.. and so
you just need to twin the cables after the detection phase.
god, do they think we're morons who can't build our own computers from parts or something?
yet another example of security that won't work in the real world.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
F.U.D.
That is what this is. Microsoft isn't going to do that, I would bet my life on it. It would instantly destroy their platform and they aren't in the business of doing that.
Microsoft does want DRM, but not at the expense of losing their platform.
Anyone that believes that article is either gullible or they want it to happen (Linux and MacOS users).
... where in most of the corporations or the industry will there be the need to play videos and media with hd quality and content?
you should do your job during office hours and thats enough work for you already that you cant even finish.
so dont worry about corporations not being to use longhorn....
only hollywood studios and very few people need hdtv/hd-content at their workplace...
and they will buy equipment and do what it needs to get their job done...
everybody else will be further enslaved by msft and the evil media/content corporations
only solution: dont buy shit you dont need, and dont even think about pirating it even if its possible. only if you keep these foolish corporations and their products and way of life out of your own life you can change and actively choose to live different....
--
thunk the unpossible
live different
Oh, so you're saying that if I buy a monitor, instead of renting one from you, you'll stop releasing crappy hollywood movies in any format that my monitor can display it in?
:)
Promise?
In the meantime, would you mind releasing ads in this format, too?
I hope my 30" Cinema Display is secure enough to...never mind.
Which is why I continue to use Win2k. I haven't had many problems with it over the years and really don't require anything more from an OS. If anything, it has become more solid and less prone to attacks since the focus tends to be on later versions.
:-)
If there's media I can't download due to restrictions, it's their loss I'm afraid - as there are usually several different ways to get at the content.
I don't see that changing anytime soon.
I run a refurb shop for computers. It seems to me that 85% (I don't have stats, but it sounds right) of desktop computers are sold without a monitor. Provided Linux comes up with a way to properly play the content, I'll be able to take a Linux box to a customer and say "Just look at what you could be doing if you didn't insist on low-quality Microsoft Windows. Just look at the poor video quality Windows provides."
Even if Linux doesn't come up with a way to play the content, most people are still going to be playing video back on their old monitors. Many will see the higher quality offered by CE devices and stop using Windows for multimedia. Others will buy the PR crap that their monitors just aren't good enough. However, monitors are pricy. Most people wait as long as possible to upgrade their monitor. You'd be surprised at the number of systems I've serviced that have a top-of-the-line video card and an 800x600 max resolution monitor. They will still turn to alternatives and blame Windows.
Request a Linux Shockwave player here: http://www.macromedia.com/support/email/wishform/
HDCP devices exchange a key that is embedded in the device itself -- in this case, a key that would be embedded in the monitor. You should read the spec here to improve your understanding:
e v1_1.pdf
http://www.digital-cp.com/home/HDCPSpecificationR
So there is no need for name-calling -- it is a monitor thing.
Will longhorn also detect that the camcorder that happens to be pointed at my monitor doesn't have any DRM support? I wonder how much we're going to have to pay for all this great technography that helps the cause of "others".
>Linux just isn't ready for primetime.
Depends what you mean by primetime.
I gave a bunch of Kubuntu cd's to some friends who are the average Windows power users, know about Linux but where never really tempted to try and who have old PII's lying around in the basement. They liked it so much that 2 of them gave the old cpu;s to their parents just so they dont have to worry about virus and such.
Th first words out of everyone's mouth was "There is no difference between this and a Win machine" and most couldnt find a reason why the average user (who doesnt need job specific software) couldnt switch to Linux/OSS. ALL had the same caveat though: "Can you play PC games on it?"
For Joe SP, all you need is to be able to surf, DL, listen/burn music and videos, do some word processing and other basic utilities AND.....being able to play NHL 2005.
Make sure that the last one is possible and Linux IS ready.
The convincing part is going to be the hardest.
dre
this is all about the laptop market. you can't upgrade the display on a laptop, thus, to play this content your choices are: 1) buy a new laptop ($ for bill from the longhorn license and dell+intel than you for your support), 2) be screwed.
bastards.
Microsoft isn't just caving to the media industries with this system - it's also a direct attack on Linux. Here's a quote from the white paper (the general context is that Longhorn graphics drivers will be require to verify that they are actually talking to an authorized chip(!)):
"The questions asked by the driver software must result in answers that are difficult for anything other than valid hardware to produce. Two mechanisms can be used for this:
* The calculation of the answer in hardware must be so complex that it would be impractical for anyone to emulate the hardware necessary to calculate the answer.
- Or -
* The internal workings of the graphics chip must be kept secret, such that a hacker building an emulator could not find out the required information.
In practice, using a combination of complexity and secrecy is likely to be the best option. When secrets are involved, the HFS code in the vendor-supplied driver should be obfuscated to prevent it being reverse engineered, although there is no absolute requirement to do obfuscation."
This is the perfect excuse for Microsoft to MANDATE that Linux never get new graphics drivers! "I'm sorry, we can't give you databooks for our new GPU because then we'll lose our Windows certification." Anti-competitive practices, anyone?
In a nutshell this is the US economy and how our business leaders and politicians think. It is funny to the extreme, except for the sucky parts which are ALL of them.
Microsoft as an official company is SO FAR OUT TO LUNCH they need the hubble telescope to see reality.
I'd like to say I wish them well, but I don't. I hope they edselize, the sooner the better. If any corporation ever needed to just go far far away, they are the one. Biggest planetary drag on innovation and the economy out there, taken as a gestalt. Why worry about outsourcing or chinese nukes or "terrorists" when your own merkun companies like microsoft and the entertainment monopolies and their bribed off politicians can do an outstanding job of screwing you over all by themselves?
I honestly think MS marketing has lost it, absolutely no ideas any more other than new ways to be crooks. And lame crooks to boot. I keep waiting for *anything* to come from them that could be classified as good, and just plain ain't seeing it. Ya ya ya they'll keep making money for awhile, but eventually even the dullest of the dull realises they are being serial conned.
Well, if that actually makes it into the release, it's just the final nail in the coffin. As if all the other crap that Microsoft is putting into the OS isn't enough, I am simply not going to risk some game or video editing software telling me that my monitor isn't good enough, and that's that.
I've been using Linux on my server and firewall for more than 10 years. A year and a half ago, I switched my laptop to Linux, and set up a dualboot on my desktop. That smacks it... as soon as Cedega supports all of my games, Winders is gonzo.
What, do these jackasses think monitors grow on trees?
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
I DO NOT want to have to deal with this crap, that's why I'm learning and using Linux as much as possible right NOW.
My main complaint with Longhorn is all the DRM they want to stuff into it. I wonder how many oher people see Longhorn as a kneecapped product?
everyone who wants a new computer in a few years. Most consumers will NEVER even hear about this technology, much lke they never heard about laws that take away our fair use rights. Most people i talk to IRL, have never heard of the DMCA.
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
Bad taste, I know, but I couldn't resist.
If you read Microsoft's little plan for drm, you might notice subtle hints on video card design. These hints could be interpreted as:
"You may want to include lots of undocumented interfaces for you video card, as that will make it easier to certify your card. Try to conceal the exact functionality from the dirty Linux hippie thieves."
However, I haven't used Linux in a long time, having switched to Macs. Perhaps obfuscation of video hardware is now the norm.
I see this as history repeating itself in a way. Apple is now showing some tendency in freeing itself from a restricted hardware environment. While Microsoft wants to get into more restricted hardware environment. I just wonder how two companies that more or less in the same business have two completely orthogonal objectives.
While it gives a feeling that Apple is making the right move, it also makes us all think why MIcrosoft is doing this. Why MS is more focused on game-console products. Is it because they foresee a future of just consoles that would replace PCs ? Eventually would mean that Apple would capture all the PC market.
It was OS first then came productivity tools, then came the mouse, then the game console now display units... what next? The World ?
TV's that scan their viewing field every 10 seconds for people watching, take a biometric from irises then charge the viewer's "copyright material viewing account" for the amount of content they just saw?
If it turns out that this does go through and it causes me any problems, I'll just use unprotected (i.e. pirated) content. It's fine if they make DRM that allows me to use legal stuff all the ways I want, but if my legal stuff doesn't work how I want, I'll just use illegal stuff.
I wonder how much of this project Apple knew when they signed up to use Intel? Will we see East Fork in the G6?
Have we just been told to East Fork Off instead of the "Don't Steal Music" Apple have used up to now?
The Inquirer is reporting about plans by Intel to cut Linux out of the content market. The best thing is that people actually pay for this crap. We finance this garbage right now.
Time to cancel my cable subscription and think about more important things in life than Bullywood movies.
The bottom line is that as bandwidth and network performance increases and peer-to-peer use becomes more pervasive and legitimate (e.g. built into opera browser), the circumstances allowing people to receive high quality (in terms of a/v resolution) digital content over networks comes into place simultaneously with the means for effortless piracy.
a u67ur080j3
I would love to be able to buy "I'm Alan Partridge" directly from the BBC without having to wait for it to come out on DVD (let alone come out on DVD in the US). I would love to watch the SABC news from south africa, in High Def. I would love to buy out of print records in full SACD quality, but only pay for the B-side.
Imagine an online record store that sold everything on allmusic.com!
http://www.allmusic.com/cg/amg.dll?p=amg&sql=10:6
instead of an online record store that looks like a local sam goody (itunes)
One of the major things preventing these products from being available is the lack of a universal, accepted DRM systems.
As far as keeping "backups" of your purchased content, if all of the content is purchased over a network, then certainly if local copies of your purchased content are damaged or lost, then you'd be able to re-download it, the DRM system would easily identify the download as legitimate (because you already paid for that item) (I know itunes doesn't do this, but others do)
And if it all is too cumbursome (which it doesn't have to be e.g. itunes) people will bag it and continue to purchase content by traditional means.
If, however, the product is better quality, more convienient, cheaper, and there is a greater selection, then by all means bring it on.
Or, for that matter, the old adage, "The plural of anecdote is not data."
And did you ever stop to think that, just maybe, the reason that Consumer Reports consistently rates them highly, while you hear of a few people saying they're junk, is because the junk ones are the exception, rather than the rule?
Or are you just as much of a zealot as you are accusing those mythical ghost-survey-takers of being, and can't possibly believe that Apple might actually care about quality?
Dan Aris
Fun. Free. Online. RPG. BattleMaster.
Good job getting down with the people. I see that you also emulated their punctuation habits, seeing as how Joes don't know how to use the apostrophe, either.
If you want to push resolutions a lot higher than the current stagnation point, there's a major bandwidth shortage. The next spec to come out already has soem pretty robust DRM provisions built in. They aren't mandatory for standards compliance, but the market is probably going to make it a de facto standard. After all, who wants to buy a TV or monitor that won't play the latest Blu-ray/HD-DVD?
The standards for HDMI have very little to do with Microsoft. You can blame/thank Sony, Hitachi, Thomson (RCA), Philips, Matsushita (Panasonic), Toshiba and Silicon Image. It's actually a pretty exciting set of specs. Once the DRM is cracked, it'll be even more exciting...
All Microsoft is doing is building into Windows compatibility for content that the media companies are pushing. They're doing the same thing that any company trying to sell multimedia consumer gear will be doing. Blaming Microsoft is a complete misdirection imho.
argumentum ad fallacium: Fallacy of defining a fallacy which allows one to dismiss the argument in question.
I just bought a new laptop, so what the hell am I going to do now? Send it back to HP when longhorn comes out and have them stick a DRM compatable display on it? Maybe even buy a new laptop altogether? BS... I paid good money for this 1680x1050 widescreen display with MCE 2005, and it better keep playing DVDs for more than 2 years... I hope that someone figures out a way around this in Linux because I do dualboot and I must say that I'd much prefer to use some kind of workaround software on my favorite OS than send the laptop out to get a new screen or buy a new laptop...
Just to be fair, that's in the Quicktime Player, not in Quicktime itself. There's plenty of other apps that throw full screen video up for you, even after processing by Quicktime...
The original point still stands, though. There will be standards out there that enforce DRM right through to the display device - probably in the near future. All MS is doing is ensuring compatibility. And hey, it doesn't hurt them to play nice with the media companies that help support the legal infrastructure on which MS's business model is based now, does it?
argumentum ad fallacium: Fallacy of defining a fallacy which allows one to dismiss the argument in question.
This signifies the beginning of the end for Windows. They ditch two major features of the operating system and fuck us with this. Very stupid idea during an infamous open-source era. This sDRM (Shitty Digital Rights Management) defies all laws of backwards compatibility and for the first time, I'm actually willing to boycott the OS. 'Goodbye, Windows. Hello, Linux.' My informed customers will chant the same slogan.
$299 Base
+ $119 for XP Pro (I hate XP Home)
+ $50 for CD-RW
+ $20 for the reinstall CD (kinda useful if there is a problem)
That brings me up to $490.
I'm not including Office, because I either need that or I don't, and its the same price. Both machines need RAM upgrades, so that is a wash...
I'm just saying that they are in the same price range, and that is for the Dell Dimension... The Optiplex are much more comparable, but the price difference is a wash, +/- $50.
The MAIN difference is the OS. I can't use XP Home as a useful OS for an office environment, I can use OS X.
There are software advantages to both, depending on usage. But I find the machines for office usage to be about a wash on the low end. There are DEFINITE areas where Apple machines aren't competitive, and the lack of customization IS a problem (anytime I make a Dell equivalent, the price is a wash, but with the Apple, I can't save money downgrading unnecessary things).
Alex
If you really want to watch that video full screen, just zoom the screen in until the video takes up the whole screen. (Assuming the aspect ratios of the screen and your video are the same of course...) I also use this trick when I want to enlarge an image or even text to show somebody across the room.
I'm not a journalist, but I play one on slashdot
The Mac Mini hits the cheap, entry level office machine price.
Build from scratch, XP Pro is approx. $200 (and I assume Longhorn will be similar).
Buy the low-end Dell that comes with XP Home, and its $119 to upgrade to XP Pro, and I have CD-RWs on my Windows machines, because my Quickbooks files are too big to email so I need to burn them and send them to my accountant for tax purposes.
Now, if I want a entry-level Unix workstation running Linux, then $500 can get your further. But if you want XP Pro/Longhorn Pro, the machines are comparable.
For a legal system, a home-built machine requires a $200 operating system, or a $120 upgrade off the base level.
Alex
If you were a lawyer, you'd know how to spell "precedent"!
Until someone figures out how to disable that "feature" in Longhorn.
Or downgrade to previous release of Windows.
Or even switch to something else (here I'm showing my optimistic side by assuming there will be something else to switch to :) .
hany
All your resolution are belong to us.
Mwwwahhhhhahaahaaaha.
Say hello to my little sig.
Most people don't care about watching video on their PC. I know someone who was all excited about his new "Media Center" PC when he got it. Then he discovered he can't play DVDs he recorded on anything else - including his DVD player in the living room. He doesn't talk about it any more, and obviously he doesn't bring over any cool shows he recorded either. The only thing I've ever really said about it is "why do you want to watch TV on a 17 inch monitor?". Now he's got a DVD recorder by the TV. It's just stupid, and when these issues come up, Joe consumer is just going to buy an HD-DVD player and connect it to his TV.
The real key to all this is to spread FireFox. If web sites decide they have to support alternative browsers, there just won't be any DRMed content anyway. The stuff you buy in the store most people don't view on the PC. This is an attempt by Hollywood to eliminate the distribution channels (and costs), but people just don't want to download movies and watch them on a PC - not most people.
So what will Microsoft and the MPAA require next--a mandatory webcam permanently bolted to the top of your monitor that shuts it off if it detects that you're pointing a camcorder at it?
Seriously. How did whatever suits who came up with this idea get their heads so far up into their posteriors? It's just like Real complaining that Apple won't license their DRM for the iPod--as if Apple and not DRM itself was the real problem. So now, the MPAA and Microsoft want to eliminate the market for high-def PC content in a hopeless quest to try and stop a few people from intercepting and stripping DRM from the high quality signal. Unbelievable!
People almost all of you are part of the problem. Not just non-geeks. Why do go around calling people consumers?? You've already been brainwashed. You're citizens or people!
Who the hell cares if you can't see some dumbass movie or the listen to the latest manufactured pop star's video???
I'm gonna be labelled a troll for sure, but hell this mentality burns my butt. The problem isn't DRM the problem is that you all believe you *need* to see the lame things being offered up.
Come on. You got better things to *do* than just be a content "consumer". And for those that don't they deserve all the DRM and rights violations that are happening. Look at where you've been lead to think. If you don't think the content is worth the price they are asking for it then clearly the answer isn't to fight DRM.... the answer is just don't buy it.
i don't see why we have to rely on market forces to defeat drm, we shouldn't. market forces won't defeat drm because AverageJoe doesn't care enough to avoid drm content and will cave in and by the new moniter or whatever else he needs to get his content to work. sure he'll be pissed about being forced to do so, but HE WILL STILL DO IT!!! since he won't beleive that he has a choice.
I say we take a more direct route and just sue the companies for violating whatever free-use rights they are violating. doesn't this kind of thing qualify as extortion or something? i'm sure we can find something that declares this treatment of consumers as illegal, i say we use it and sue the pants off them. (this would require that we refuse to take the settlements that they use to try to bribe us into being quite)
As long as there is an analog hole, there will always be a workaround.
1) buy compliant hardware with nasty anti-copy features
2) shoot screen with high-quality film camera
3) develop and digitize film
4) ???
5) PROFIT!
It's called Xorg.conf Whenever you plug a new monitor into your computer, it must be hand configured with the proper modlines in your xorg.conf or the monitor will be run in a depreciated state of 1024x768, or in some cases 640x480, depending on your monitor provider. To find out if your monitor is complient, you may check the plug and play data that xorg helpfully looks up and throws out every time it is started. /Linux will never be for normal users so long as it's designed by and for programmers
XP was out for something like five years before I broke down and got a copy. I'm finding fewer reasons to use the token Windoze box on my network for anything. At that pace I'm probably A) Never going to buy Longbone or B) It will be so far in the future someone will have come up with a monitor device that allows you to change how the monitor identifies itself.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Hours? fuckin n00bs. The real man uses Gentoo, and it takes days... no, weeks!--to configure it.
DRM is a negative for those of us who want to download a/v and game content and play it on any hardware medium. The point of DRM is security for both corporations AND the consumers. Look up the word security http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=security.
Before you flame me understand that those of us who have the ability to download a/v and game content and play it on any hardware medium, are neither consumers nor corporations. We are hackers(in the traditional meaning). We are research scientists. We are hardware geeks. We are computer nerds. We are phreakers. We are modern explorers. We are thinking out-of-the-box. We are marching to the beat of our own drummer. We are reality engineers.
So, quite whining about the plight of the flock. They need the shepherd to guide them. Let the shepherd benefit from his work. However, when your expedition finds a new type of greener grass make sure you defend it and then charge the shepherds a premium to graze their flocks on your grass.
ok, so he's not like robin hood. find. but at least he's an open source hero.
best college pickem site ever: pickem.terrbear.org
until people start making little boxes to plug into the line which give the computer a fake signal as to what monitor it is when the computer enquires?
FGD 135
[!] We're sorry. You cannot view this message on your current hardware because it is not secure enough for the content of this message. Please consult Windows Help for more information, or your financial advisor.
FOOLS! I will destroy you ALL!
These kind of situations makes me think of the episode when Herb wants Homer to design a car.
Herb: OK Homer, pick out any one you want.
Homer: I'd like a big one, then.
Automotive Engineer: We don't have big ones.
Homer: Why not?
Automotive Engineer: Because Americans don't want big cars.
Homer: Well then give me one with lots of pep.
Automotive Engineer: "Sorry our cars don't have pep.
Herb: Why not?
Automotive Engineer: Because American's want good mileage, not pep.
Herb: Homer, tell the nice man what country you come from.
Homer: America!
Herb: Did you hear that ya moron?!
That's what this is all about.
If Longhorn is a bloated mess and comes with utter sillyness such as "monitor DRM" that requires you to buy a new monitor (remember the MS keyboard? Keyboard manufacturers were crawling up MS' ass to be able to build and sell them) then the hardware vendors will hail Longhorn as the best OS ever. And be happy to sell you the great hardware you need to honor this OS.
That's what this is all about.
I hope they screw this one up.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
It's being driven by content providors such as FOX, MGM, SONY, RIAA to name a few.
Linux and OSX will have to follow suit and provide this silly method of content protection if playback is to be expected, otherwise you'll be locked out.
With everyone using the phrase As long as I can see or hear it, I can record it, it was only a matter of time before they tried to come up with a method of doing just that... next up..... DRM'ed speakers and headphones.
I'll believe in corporations having personhood when Texas executes one... - advocate_one
To me, content that restricts what, when, how and where I can experience it is degraded, not premium, and I don't want it in the first place.
You say dont blame microsoft....but here it comes....there selling and pushing the snake oil and developing it and the MPAA and the Riaa and the likes are eating it up. .... its a stupid concept.....I buy Black vinyl records if i can get the artist in that form and spend the extra then pay for a defective DRMed CD thats got lower qualaty... that may or not play on all my toys...DRM in my eyes is a concept of social engernering...that the sheeple will follow the the slaughter house in droves.
to me any DRMed product is a stay away product... just spent 700 on a monitor...BS if im going to scrap it so i can watch something
MacroVision for VHS wasn't 100% effective either, but it was enough to stop the vast majority of people from copying video tapes.
I can spend a hour trying to find a bad overly compressed screen capture of a movie off BT, or $15 for a new one at Target, or $3 for a rental at BB. Which one is a better use of my time? Which course of action gives me a better movie experience?
All the studios need to do is protect the majority of their market, while not pissing them off by being too heavy handed, and they'll succeed. And don't think for a second they haven't been observing the music/mp3/itunes battles with great interest.
I don't think they're going to make all of the same mistakes, but I do expect them to do what they can to protect their investments.
And if P2P and Freenet become perceived as too much of a problem, those protocols will be monitored, banned, disrupted, blocked, and/or the users fined or jailed. Too many people think that because their computer is sitting down in their basement that their internet access is "private" and unmonitored and untraceable.
I've said before, and I'll say it again. The key here is not to crack and steal their work, but to create and patronize new models and new works. Do the first, and you enter into an arms race. Do the second, and they have no choice but to embrace them... or die.
Any sect, cult, or religion will legislate its creed into law if it acquires the political power to do so.
I just listened to Engadget's podcast interview with Bill Gates. When asked about HD DVD and tech like IPTV he says that devices with digital HD technology have to have "the same level of Digital Rights Management as DVD has now."
Let's hope. We know how rock solid DVD DRM is.
Ever dream you could fly? Get up from the Flight Sim. I Fly
Frankly, I welcome the coming of the Timex Sinclair 4096 with open arms! Oh how I have pined for thee...
And it'll be easier than ever to load programs now that we have DAT. Plus those surplus DAT tapes from the utter failure of the format have got to be dirt cheap!
But I don't think sales will go well unless they bind Ruby keywords to the keys instead of BASIC. Just a suggestion.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Sorry. WHAT "Premium Content"? That just pure marketing bullshit. I don't care about Premium Content. In my last house I had a data projector making my TV on the wall 8 feet wide. I watched regular DVDs with a great picture quality. If I can't watch HDTV quality then boo hoo hoo, my life is ruined*.
Apathy cuts lots of ways. I've just bought a Mac because I'm sick of screwing around with Windows dialog boxes, setup screens, popups from the system tray, inexplicable delays, hourglasses spinning, etc. etc. I love the Mac. Never had one before. So what do you think I'm going to do when Longhorn comes out? ONE BIG YAWN.
Apathy rules!
*Sarcasm.
Longhorn does not require a special monitor to view movies. That's just laughable. Longhorn will have DRM features for certain content providers who want draconian control over their content. Don't buy their content. iMovies store will be out soon enough and will probably have more palatable DRM that doesn't require new hardware.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
The article said if not connected to a "secure" monitor the video "degrades", basically it sounds like half-res or something along those lines.
Two approaches for attack then - figure out where the "degrading" code is, and hack that to simply not degrade.
Optionally use some sort of virtual screen software that makes it look like your monitor has twice the resolution, so you see the video at full res. That only works if it just halves the res from what you have, probably it would halve the res from the original source size.
Perhaps then you could figure out how to lie about what the video size really is as far as the down-resser is concerned.
One thing I do know, you'd have to be an idiot to buy any content produced for this system.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I think you all have the wrong point-of-view on this issue. So what they implement DRM, big deal. I say if they can tell us what we can do with the content we buy, we should get together and invent CRM (Cash Rights Management) to tell them what they can do with the money. So we don't like it that they buy huge gas-guzzling SUV's? Or make slavish workers in Africa mine the dirt for their diamonds and jewels? Or use up enormous amounts of energy or resources jet-setting around the world? Just turn off these uses of the cash they get. Simple. They want to restrict what we do with the content we buy, we'll just restrict what they can do with the cash we buy it with.
BlackBox - "Hey, all this data I copied is encrypted and useless to me without that decoder built into that specific monitor"
Monitor - "Ha Ha! You will never escape me!"
PC - "What a moron."
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I made a Linux box and lived off the DRM grid.
If the broadcast flag wouldn't fly, no way is a law requiring DRM to be embedded in all PC's going to fly. Microsoft has money to solicit politicians with but so do IBM and Sun.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If the capability is to be built in, what is to stop Microsoft to bow to pressure to make sure Media Player also demands the secure channel for standard DVD playback as well? After all, new laptop purchasers would surely have secure monitors so it wouldn't affect that many people...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
*groan* No, people, you don't need to go out and buy a new $300 monitor to avoid this. This is NEW technology. Go to your local used PC dealer and buy a USED monitor, which won't be capable of letting Big Brother have his little peep-show. For $25 bucks, you can get whatever was top-of-the-line just five years ago.
PS: just learn a little about hardware, and you'll never have to sweat this kind of restriction. See, proprietary systems want another pound of flesh out of you every six months, so they deliberately release new, identical garbage with different colors all the time. This compells you to keep going out and buying new hardware, throwing away hardware that may have another 50-years worth of use . This is about half of what created systems like Linux. We Linux geeks are coming in behind you, scooping up the virtually free hardware, and installing new operating systems on it that make it work so good, it out-performs today's newest, high-end machinery. The hardware almost lasts forever. And what the heck, I buy in quanity, so I always have backups.
So thank you, Joe Sixpack, for burn-testing the $2000 dollar system for me and then letting me get it for $200 just six months later! Now that you've spent all the money on it and thrown it out in frustration when trashy software made it perform like crap, I'll scoop it up and run a real system on it and have a machine that'll give me at least ten years of use.
This will give most average consumers a simple understandable logical reason to Finally ask the following question.
"Ok Microsoft is out, like Tandy computer was when they made their cases too short to fit most 16 bit cards, What else is their?"
Biggest mistake Tandy ever made was peeing in the face that fed it.
Welcome to your new home.
Linux here, can I help you?>
Now about 900 of the 1,000 Linux distros need to consolidate collapse into the remaining, fix what needs to be fixed.
Its not the same day as it was yesterday.
The average Joe or Joanne has good reason to feel about windows the same way the average Linux admin does now.
You know if I didint know better I would have to say microsoft wants out of the PC market entirely.
... because the stream has to be decrypted in real time. And it's a huge stream - say, 1280 X 1024 pixels X 3 bytes/pixel X 60 frames/second = 235929600 bytes/second. That gives the monitor 4.24 nanoseconds to decode each byte. I doubt they can do Rijndael in that time...
So it's either lame crypto or no crypto, and so my guess is a splitter will be adequate to grab the stream. You might need to decrypt it as a post-processing step, but I think it will probably not be that hard to do.
First, Microsoft removes some of the expected features from Longhorn, like a new filesystem.
Now, Microsoft essentially reduces the number of compatible hardware devices by a rather large chunk, all but requiring you to buy a new monitor if you upgrade your OS.
What's next on Microsoft's checklist to totally gimp adoption their new OS? Will they be announcing soon that the OS is Itanium-only?
I can hear it now... "Don't have a cool thousand dollars for a high end LCD TV?? Don't worry!! You can keep your old monitor and get a warm fuzzy feeling watching all your secure media content right within Windows(R) Longhorn(tm)!! And we DO mean fuzzy!!"
I don't think there's a valid argument that this is the type of profiteering that copyright was meant to protect
It's not about copyright, it's about finding a technical solution to "manage" content after it has been sold to the customer. Copyright law doesn't come into it, that's just smoke and mirrors. Content producers are wetting their pants at the idea of finding new ways to make the customer pay... and the "free market" is dominated by a few very powerful players.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
People will know about DRM, they will know as much as RIAA/MPAA and mass media allow them to know. Obeying the DMCA will be presented as a moral obligation, a duty of each citizen. The opposite will be labeled as immoral, unfashionable and antisocial. Quality was never valued above trends by the "public". Why would people hear pirated MP3s at 128kbps, with all the distortion introduced by the compression? Why are they willing to watch pirated videos of torturous quality, like the recent StarWars Ep.III rip? There's no use to reason with average users any more about technological benefits. People accept buggy software and crappy quality as a necessity, as an something inherent to the nature of programming. If someone presented a piece of software as crappy and unstable as Windows XP 10 years ago, he would be ridiculed. Now, with every Windows Update you install, you computing experience "becomes more and more easy, stable and secure", thanks to Microsoft's "dedication" to its customers. Oh my. I am afraid that the contemporary "public" values only what mass media presents as valuable. Think: organic food, hybrid cars, iPods, even the firefox campaign. Unless something is popular, it is not viewed as good by the majority. I have to admit that Microsoft does have certain control over the future of computing. Soon, very soon, the newspapers and "entertainment (celebrity) magazines", then TV news will be talking about poor artists and those evil anti-social criminals who dare to object global proliferation of DRM. Meanwhile, magazines like "Popular Science" (an oxymoron within its name), "Scientific American" and various business magazines will convince the semi-intellectual remains about the wonderful future of "secure computing". Concerned citizens will call their congressmen, urging them to punish the evil hackers who strip their favorite celebrities of their means of living. Laws will be passed in US. Soon, UK and Europe will comply. Computer's transformation from a computing device into a digital jukebox will be complete. I may be a bit apocalyptic about these predictions but, unless Windows has popular alternatives, this is the direction we're heading. Alas, it's all about the PR, it's all about the politics.
09 f9 11 02 9d 74 e3 5b d8 41 56 c5 63 56 88 c0
The only reason MS software became so popular was that in the beginning, it was cheap, there wasn't much in the way of alternatives, you could copy it without much effort and it was fun to hack about on it (especially in the days when an affordable "IBM PC" based *NIX was a pipe dream whose copywrongs were still being argued about by old men)
The older "Windaz" gets the more it's becomes a complete pain in the arse to use. Shortly it will become such a royal pain that even the plebs will wonder why they're bothering. And down the plughole of history it will go.
Sadly 99% of people don't give a shit. They can't be bothered to think about anything (hey, wherever in the world you are, look at your countries government for confitmation) When they have to think about something they'll either give up and do something else or wait for something different and less bothersome to appear.
Praise Darwin !
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
I will never again own a computer running any kind of Microsoft operating system, NEVER. So who cares what "options" Long-drawn-out-overrated-piece of crap-Horn has anyway.
The Creative Audigy 2, for example, automatically disables its digital audio output when you play DVD-A. ...no one forced Creative to do this; they were quite happy to implement it themselves.
How do you know that? Couldn't they have easily been approached by the MPEG licensing authority about the fact leaving the digital output on *might* allow someone to make digital copies of the audio and therefore *might* be interpretted as the company endorsing piracy, which *might* cause litigation.
Nowadays a company has to look at the worst case scenario use for their product vs. the chances of that happening and the positive uses for it. Most companies can't afford to defend themselves against constant lawsuits, frivolous or not.
I have no idea if this man knows how the word really works, but i get a feeling he will get it when nobody buys his product and just keeps with XP or goes over to something else
Live life, don't let life live you
If you really understood what that meant, you'd be taking the time to learn Linux. Time cost is higher with Linux, but value outweighs both monetary and time costs. And then you'd learn the BSDs because you'd know where the value comes from.
And then you would no longer be stuck with either Bill Gates's view of the Universe or Steve Jobs's (or Red Hat/Novell/Theo/whoever's).
That's what this freedom stuff is really all about: being able, by investing the effort, to really choose the best tool for the job.
This all falls back to one thing which no one even has a clue about, power of the people. Yes, you see, Humans over the generations have been getting more and more brainwashed by the government and or lacking education where it is needed. I'm not trying to flame anyone but the problem does not like with the companies, but with all of you. Not one American has the balls to stand up and say that we arn't going to take it anymore. Have you ever wondered what the doctor's do to us when we are born? Perhaps its a Area 51 thing and they inject us with something so we are brainwashed for life or dumbed down enough to be the Governments mule. I've been in America since birth and I get quite sick of the crap I see daily the news or locally. Rapes, kidnapping, child killing, the bullshit war for no reason, killings, and so on. Wake up people, this is the matrix, do you want the red pill or blue one? It is up to you, you can see how far the shithole life can go or stand up and free your mind and millions others can get together and do the same. I was born luckily where I have no brain limitations of thinking and where I think outside the box called reality. If you want Microsoft's DRM to be included, feel free to sit back and let it happen. Or you can tell them "no we will not put up with this marketting non-sense." I am willing to help start a revolution but remember, we are bigger together than seperately. --- My 2 Cents.
When expecting to find intelligence in a person, do not look at their age but instead look at their IQ and maturity firs
Also from engadget: http://www.engadget.com/entry/1234000230050640
A bit expensive of course, but proves the theory. I think Steve Jobs even said on stage (maybe at D a couple of years ago) that DRM is only a stop gap. If people want to get stuff uncracked it can happen. Everything is crackable. Unless you start working on quantum algorithms you're not going to create something a computer can't deduce with enough time. Not to mention, the layering of software and hardware - (example, the TCP/IP stack sits on top of the networking stack. The window manager stack sits on top of the display stack etc.) you're always going to be able to override some library somewhere.
That's a good question.
All this arguing about RIAA's monopoly and MSmonopoly and we've got rights, we may be letting the magician fool us into watching the hand that isn't doing the trick.
It may well be that this focus on DRM is simply because it's the easiest place to put the market differentiation right now. Maybe they don't care if it works. Maybe they just want to punch the clock at 5:00 (am?) and go home believing they've done a hard day's work.
Maybe it's the justification.
Its no use arguing with the guy.
He's really saying "When its time to buy a new monitor, my mum and dad will buy it. Maybe you should ask you mum or dad to buy you a new monitor"
I mean, why else would he say "Oh no big deal, you upgrade ever 3 years anyway". Somebody better tell Junior that I just bought my 19" LCD monitor and don't intend on replacing it for about 10 years.
for anyone to buy crippled software?
Aside from the fact that NFF may eventually be banned, and we won't be able to do anything about it, there's also the fact that at least the people who want to watch/burn/upload pirated movies will be at a loss.
Probably what will happen is we'll get a bunch of people dual-booting or running some form of ram-based Knoppix (they do need more RAM for Longhorn anyway), and Longhorn will rule when people aren't actively watching/burning/uploading stuff at the moment.
The problem, of course, is that new DVDs will come out that won't play on this system. Since so few people actually rip/upload DVDs, the users won't notice/care until it's too late and no one can download DVDs anymore -- and those who do download that are so few in number that they never really had a say to begin with.
No, the backlash will come when Linux is still running on cheap(er) PCs, and Mac/Windows have pushed too far. But there's enough smart people in charge of this that there may never be backlash -- just a teensy bit more annoyance and more Slashdot raging with each incremental user castration.
But then, that's what's happening already, anyway.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
!!!!!!!! They dropped WINFS so they could develop this bullshit?????
The last time I check companies survived by consumer money. The simple way to make them suffer is to not buy their product. With apple moving to intel I'm sure many people will be less leary of moving.
It seems that lately today people are willing to pay for anything. It used to be if a company made something consumers didn't like, consumers didn't buy and the company or product goes away. Anymore companies make products we don't like and all we do is whine and complain about it but still continue to pay them for it.
Seriously, I'm starting to think that Microsoft is literally trying to lose market share with things like this. I'm sure "Digitally Secure" speakers are next up. If you have them then they only emit sound when you're playing files that you have a license for and if you don't have them then they add pops and hisses to your audio.
Of course the analog people will probably dig that but that's beside the point.
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
Ohhh noo, not the DRM!
I wonder how long it will take DVD Jon to crack this... two weeks and fifteen lines of code? Two days and one really long line of perl? Place your bets now!
I say, as a gift idea, we send the Longhorn DRM development team a huge collection of DivX movies. (The Circuit City disks that got killed in the market by DVD.)
They'd have to appreciate the irony.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
about time to get off xp too for that matter, jeez, what am I waiting for?
Dude thats a GREAT point.
MS could shut off XP activation servers say 6 months or a year after longhorn is released. They could even say that they are not supporting old operating systems like XP anymore and so wont be maintaining the activation servers for it.
Good way for them to force everyone to upgrade.
MS already has plans for audio. See this reply right under yours:= 13073774
http://it.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=155942&cid
Quote from the MS page it links:
"Protected Audio Path (PAP) is a future initiative under investigation for how to provide encryption of audio over user accessible buses."
Let's be honest. Who's going to use this besides the porn people, and the occasional Hollywood blockbuster film's website? Last thing I need is to check my email, open something that looks like it's from a friend (spammers are getting good these days) and have to deal with DRM dialogs complaining about a licensed this or trusted that. I don't even care about either of those two, and if I wasn't, I'd still be totally against this. Besides: Making stuff without DRM is faster and therefore less expensive than making stuff with DRM.
All of that is likely incorrect. Why? Because MS is talking about encrypting it before it goes over the system bus as well (so you can't "sniff" it with an oscilloscope or whatever). I'm reasonably sure that if PCI or PCI express is going to transfer information that is only encrypted, that the motherboard bios needs to be involved as well.
Good thought, but I doubt they will do option 1.
Activation is not present in what you call 'fleet' copies for the corporations on XP. So they know how to selectivly remove stuff like that.
Stop it already. There are plenty of news worthy products you can buy today. How 'bout some articles covering what's available NOW.
I think MS is adding this technology to Longhorn, for the simple reason that this may be the only way they could licence HDTV playback technology.
One of the 'features' of HD-DVD and/or blu-ray is likely to be the ability to restrict the HD output. So, if a disc is tagged as 'protected content' then, output will only be possible via an encyrpted digital channel. If such a secure digital channel is not available, then the output should be downsampled to standard resolution.
Building a consumer media based OS which cannot play the industry standard media, would be shooting themselves in the foot.
It's worth pointing out, that similar features are already present in Windows, and in some video cards. If you want to play back DVD, and your video board does not support DRM (macrovision encoding) then windows will block DVD playing software for accessing that card.
Then buying no-name monitors at local stores in non-US countries, will result in many problems.
Can Longhorn still notwithstanding this become popular. I hope not.
SCIREV.NET - fanfics,reviews & more
Possible reasons for people could be:
No iTunes where you live (or you don't like that format)
Can't use yahoo at work (or not at a computer? don't know much about this service)
$1 per song is too expensive.
Don't want to buy first what is possibly crap anyway.
I remember buying my first LPs and tapes for around 8-9 bucks. 20-25 years later, you have CDs for 25 dollars. On cheaper material, no less.
Price tripled, 8% increase per year. Would seem to be a hell of a lot higher than the cpi, there.
So, also perhaps worse value per dollar than they used to be?
Not Free SF Reader
1. Co-worker had a flaky iBook G3 in 2001, under warranty. Apple support shipped her a new one, worked fine. Another co-worker had a DVD drive issue in their Powerbook G4 /500, Apple fixed it for free, no problems since.
2. My Powerbook G3/400 ("Lombard") -- heavy use from 1999-2001, no issues.
3. My first generation Powerbook G4/500 ("Titanium") -- heavy use from 2001-2003, no out of the box issues. I dropped it once, but didn't cause any problems other than warping the side of my case. Before reselling it, I had to get a key replaced on the keyboard and replace the bottom titanium plate, and purchase a new battery. In total, that cost me maybe $500 CAD.
4. My Powerbook G4 17-inch 1.0 GHz, which I owned from May 2003 through November 2003, was flawless. I upgraded to a 1.33 GHz, which I'm typing this post on, and it also has been great. I've had to replace my power supply once (due to the side-mount power plug, the wire bends a lot when I'm on the couch in the living room -- it eventually frayed). I may get a new battery since I've been using it on the road a lot and it's starting to lose its juice.
As an individual, I've been pretty happy with Apple hardware.
I will admit the only time I've been "unhappy" with Mac hardware was when I worked in an office of Performas that would hard-crash regularly on Mac OS 8 -- this was back in 1996.
-Stu
iTunes is more popular than LimeWire.
iStudy: iTunes more popular than many P2P sites
Chances are there will eventually be more legitimate traffic than illegitimate. Now, I'm not saying the illegitimate market will shrink -- I'm saying that online content will grow, and legit means of content distro will eventually grow faster than pirate means.
-Stu
Fair enough. And actually I agree with nearly every word. I've been waiting for them to kill CDs and replace them with a DRM-only model for quite some time.
In fact, I think one of their biggest mistakes (from their own POV) is that they waited so long to support something like iTunes. The biggest hole in iTunes (again, from their POV) is the CD hole. I keep waiting for them to start pushing plug-your-iPod-into-your-car stereos so they can stop including CD players.
Are the people stupid for accepting it? Possibly, but what's their alternative? Switch out of the mainstream, which would be great. Or suck it up, which is more likely.
Could then end up having, rather than the 'I killed him because I played violent computer games', 'I killed him because I couldn't play violent computer games, my monitor wouldn't let me!'
Not Free SF Reader
Are the people stupid for accepting it? Possibly, but what's their alternative? Switch out of the mainstream, which would be great. Or suck it up, which is more likely.
The alternative is to refuse to buy DRMed content. As noted, DRM is not yet the only option... it will only become that way after enough people have bought into it. It's like Windows and computers. Once enough people buy into it, it becomes the standard.
For downloaded content, there are labels that sell their music as non-DRM mp3s. You can encourage the market to go that way by buying their content, if you like it. However, I am not suggesting that you change your preferences for music just because of the format.
That's the thing. I'm kind of an objective observer (or, alternatively, an utterly biased observer) because I don't buy music, DRMed or otherwise. I prefer talk, and I listen to a lot of recorded books (legally, from the library).
I'd love to see the presence of DRM drive people to music sources other than the RIAA. I won't be pushing it one direction or the other, myself, but the RIAA have been such creeps about this that I'd love to see them lose.
(Legally or not, they've been right bastards about the process, using the law where they can and lobbying to make it where they can't, trying to preserve a business model that must change. There are technological solutions to some of the problems they face, DRM being one, but having them say it makes the one-sidedness of the contract they've been implicitly pushing more obvious.)
Notice in my comment I posted about a guy who mentioned he got a piece of equipment from ebay to a cisco rep. The rep made him buy the liscense and pay an inspection fee. He was using the hardware fine, it was working fine, he didn't ask or need a service contract. Yet cisco made him shell out money for the software.
Sure the stuff hasn't been tested in court. But you think any companies would take it to court? Cisco would stop any support of thier products if they tried, and charge them massive money. The only people who might not bow down to cisco under pressure would be individual users, and I really really doubt they'd spend the money to fight it in court.
So since no one can or is able to stand up in court against them, it will continue. Kinda like RIAA and thier 10,000 lawsuits. Not one of those cases have gone to trial. Most have settled for a couple grand.
As for cars, if carmakers had thier way, sure they'd love to do that.
Example, carmakers have tried to make things proprietary before, like the car error codes, and the readers. They've tried to make it so only dealers could service the cars. Fortunately there were laws passed to make standards for the cars. OBD-II etc.
It is? I downloaded VLC (for free) and play videos full-screen just fine on my Mac. Nothing forces you to QT to play movies on OS X, and there are many decent alternatives. Who TF modded you insightful.
(While you're astroturfing, also keep in mind that Windows XP can't even play DVDs out the box without getting additional software like PowerDVD.)
it's primarily a software solution which looks for the monitor feature, and fucks up the imagery
The imagery is "f*cked up" to begin with, it's a hardware solution that unfucks up the imagery ONLY if the correct software is found (i.e. Longhorn). The data is stored encrypted, it will look like garbage if you try play it in a 'non-approved' system.
I have one black and white tv. Practically giving these away, the Chinese. :)
Not Free SF Reader
"Nuke from orbit the only way to make sure"
In short, I have no problem accepting being called a consumer, because I AM ONE! So are you, Quicksilver, your vehement denials notwithstanding; at a minimum you are a consumer of IP bandwidth, or you couldn't have posted. It doesn't mean that a consumer is *all* you are, but it is an accurate albeit limited label, just as 'citizen' or 'registered voter' might be, and your strident denials of it are just as silly and self defeating as saying "I'm not a citizen, I'm a person!" (That's assuming you are in fact a citizen, otherwise it's even sillier.)
If you want to amend your rants to "I'm not *just* a consumer", then you will at least no longer be inaccurate, just boring and trite, as this is (believe it or not) as blindingly obvious to everyone else as it is to you.
premium content with a screen capture program running it will play anyways.
I'm still running Windows 2000.
... this is probably true. I am a salesman at a tech retailor, though not a good one since I keep suggesting free solutions to problems :). I am constantly amazed at how other sales reps can turn the shortcomings of a product into indespensible features quicker than a full marketing division.
Lets face it. People who are not technologically savvy will, by and large, eventually put their trust in the "lastest and greatest" trends and will eventually accept whatever the industry giants produce. It is similar to the situation of independant films. If one movie stars Tom Cruise (or say, M$FT), and another was made by a small group of people that nobody has heard of (for the sake of argument lets say any open source project), the result will be that they will be seen differently in the public eye. Sure a few get noticed and become great hits, but soon people will be going back to see the next multi-billion dollar premier. People can be funny like that. Though I guess most people don't find the bahhing of sheep to be funny.
I will not buy Longhorn if it includes such obtrusive corporate totalitarian measures.
Microsoft will not impose it Digital Rights Misappropriation on me.
Right? How could this not be a joke?
Deeper, you have control of the actual content via DRM. Sure content can be produced by anyone, but those behind the DRM scheme have the last say on what actually plays, and when, where, how, and how often it plays. That's not the same as the creator or distributor deciding, even if they wishes appear at this time to overlap, and is an important difference. In essence it's about a firm step towards controlling all media content.
Of course, Europe's no shining example there either and has delayed the current anti-trust case for a few more months to the benefit of MS ... and has replaced the judge hearing the case.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.