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Virtualization May Break Vista DRM
Nom du Keyboard writes "An article in Computerworld posits that the reason Microsoft has flip-flopped on allowing all versions of Vista to be run in virtual machines, is that it breaks the Vista DRM beyond detection, or repair. So is every future advance in computer security and/or usability going to be held hostage to the gods of Hollywood and Digital Restrictions Management? 'Will encouraging consumer virtualization result in a major uptick in piracy? Not anytime soon, say analysts. One of the main obstacles is the massive size of VMs. Because they include the operating system, the simulated hardware, as well as the software and/or multimedia files, VMs can easily run in the tens of gigabytes, making them hard to exchange over the Internet. But DeGroot says that problem can be partly overcome with .zip and compression tools -- some, ironically, even supplied by Microsoft itself.'"
JVC hdtv, name and shame.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
I have as much reason to hate MS's operating systems as the next guy. No, scratch that, I have vastly more reason to hate MS's OS's than the next guy, having watched them attempt to undermine and destroy OS/2 back in the early 90's, back before it become fashionable to hate MS OS's. I remember having to put up with the constantly shifting Win32s extensions for Windows 3.1, which were modified for the sole purpose of breaking OS/2 compatibility. Or their (then new) "per-processor license agreements". I haven't run a Windows machine as my desktop since 1992, having run OS/2, Linux, and Mac OS X (in that order) since that time.
As such, it really pains me greatly to say -- Vista under virtualization is surprisingly decent and well behaved. I've been running the 64-bit Business Edition of Vista inside VMware Fusion on a new 2.16Ghz Core 2 Duo MacBook with 2GB of RAM, and it's surprisingly quick and agile. Sure, I don't get Aero (which just looks bad to me anyhow -- honestly, how is an alpha-blended window title a good thing?), and I'm not using it to play games, and I don't use it to browse the web or do e-mail or digital media, but overall it has been very well behaved, and has been surprisingly quick to boot and run. I've even experimented with it running digital video, and the performance has been very good.
Now of course, I can see why they'd be worried about their DRM stance. As the VMware audio and video go through a virtualized driver/device to the Mac's hardware, it would be easy to use readily available tools to hijack the stream (like Rogue Amoeba's excellent Audio Hijack Pro.
Now there is no way in hell I'd ever run Windows as my primary OS -- still think their UI scheme is garbage, and don't like the fact they have both systematically loaded their systems with crap to appease other corporations while punishing their own end-users (DRM), and that they've frequently promised features they've never delivered (anyone else remember when they promised a stand-alone MS-DOS v7? Or when they promised an OODBMS-based filesystem for Cairo starting back in 1996? That same filesystem they didn't deliver with Vista? Or how about when they finally decided it was time to introduce a new filesystem for the 9X line that instead of using a well-designed FS they owned all the rights to, like HPFS or NTFS, they instead exacerbated the problem with a band-aid solution and invented FAT32?). It's still not what I look for in a desktop OS, but as much as it pains me to say it, on a modern machine (and the latest MacBook is hardly top-of-the-line, although it's certainly quite a capable system), under virtualization, Vista actually runs pretty acceptably. If I had to use it as my day-to-day system (and I don't use it much at all -- it's there to support a development toolset for some embedded programming I'm peripherally involved in), it certainly wouldn't be slow or painful to use -- it's instantly responsive, and has so far behaved very well (i.e.: it hasn't crashed yet).
Strange but true.
Yaz.