UK Greens Declare Vista Bad For Environment

schwaang writes "The UK Green Party says that Vista's DRM requirements will force many unnecessary hardware upgrades. Quoting: 'There will be thousands of tonnes of dumped monitors, video cards, and whole computers that are perfectly capable of running Vista — except for the fact they lack the paranoid lock down mechanisms Vista forces you to use. That's an offensive cost to the environment. Future archaeologists will be able to identify a "Vista Upgrade Layer" when they go through our landfill sites.'"

Comments

Re:Am I missing something?

[a_nonamiss]

The whole DRM thing concerns high definition media. Have you tried playing Blu-Ray on said laptop? HD-DVD? If you did, I think you'd find that you can't play it in high definition. It will downgrade the signal if you try to play it on your 2-year old Celeron, and will not play in full 1080p glory. That's what all the bruhaha is about. It's not a big deal to some people (like myself, who has a 50-inch HDTV and could care less about playing it on his PC) but to others this functionality is important. The bottom line is we aren't getting what we paid for.

Re:How many dgrees

[Anonymous Coward]

Vista's DRM will support High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) which will regulate what types of periferals (monitors, sound cards, video cards, etc.) that can show, play, encode, decode, etc. the content. For example, you may not be able to watch a movie (or only be able to watch it at lower definition) unless your video card monitor and sound card are all approved by Mircosoft. HDCP will only be supported by new components hence the need to upgrade. Monitors are paricularly harmful to the environment because they contain quite a bit of lead. http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/question678.h tm

Re:Linux is bad for it too

[the plant doctor]

For Ubuntu try this:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/install.exe

For Debian, the sister project of Ubuntu's project:
http://goodbye-microsoft.com/index.html

*disclaimer, I've not tried either one. Just thought they might be of use to you in this situation.

Re:Am I missing something?

[massysett]

Have you tried playing Blu-Ray on said laptop? HD-DVD? If you did, I think you'd find that you can't play it in high definition.

Have you tried it? The non-HDCP signal degradation is optional, at the disc maker's option. My understanding is that most discs being shipped now do *not* have this degradation option enabled, because the studios know that most equipment out there right now does not have HDCP. A link from the article below claims that Hollywood promises not to enable the degradation until 2012 (take that promise for what it's worth.) So if your ancient laptop actually had a Blu-ray, it would probably play fine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_Constraint_Toke n

I'm no DRM or Vista fan, but a lot of people on both sides of this debate are spreading misinformation.