Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Answers Vista DRM Critics' Claims
skepsis writes "Recently there have been some stories on Slashdot claiming that Vista would downgrade the quality of audio and video for every application in a machine where protected content was running. One of the stories painted a scary scenario where a 'medical IT worker who's using a medical imaging PC while listening to audio/video played back by the computer' would have his medical images 'deliberately degraded.' A post has been put up on the Vista team blog explaining exactly how the content protection works, and it turns out the medical IT staff and audio pros can relax. From the post: 'It's important to emphasize that while Windows Vista has the necessary infrastructure to support commercial content scenarios, this infrastructure is designed to minimize impact on other types of content and other activities on the same PC. For example, if a user were viewing medical imagery concurrently with playback of video which required image constraint, only the commercial video would be constrained -- not the medical image or other things on the user's desktop.'"
The fact still remains that Microsoft has no right to dictate how I use my PC, or what I choose to do with any content on that machine. I've been using MS products since 1987, and am a professional programmer of Microsoft products, but am now using a Mac at home thanks to Vista. Nobody has the right to dictate how I use my computer, or for what purposes. Many governments in the world have tried, and they can all go fuck themselves as far as I'm concerned. Why should I respect the demands of a corporation who has even less right than a government to impose arbitrary censorship rules on me? They can rot in hell. I'm done with Microsoft.
That sounds like the classic schoolyard antic of yelling something to the effect of: "You're an ugly egotistical fart sniffer. No offense." or Google never getting any of its products out of Beta. Or legalizing civil unions. "They're not getting married, they're just pledging to live as a family unit in which two adults engaged in a monogonous long term realtionship."
Slashdot posts it, therefore it's slashdot's news. It would also be like the New York Times not taking responsibility for any of the articles it posts since "well that's just what our author wrote."