Microsoft's part of problem is that rather than saying "Don't do that - fix your program so it can run under a normal user account", they made it so you can run as administrator, and then tried to intercept user actions that might hose things up.
That is the very problem that UAC solves very effectively in Vista. UAC makes all applications run as a regular limited user unless that application is explicitly granted full administrative privileges through a UAC dialog.
Under Vista if you only run well-behaved applications you will almost never see a UAC prompt. Software that insists on running with full administrative privileges causes a UAC prompt to appear.
Users complain about the prompts and disable UAC without thinking about the fact that by doing so they loose a very effective layer of security. When UAC is disabled all applications run with full administrative privileges whether they need it or not.
I don't have a standalone Blu-ray player or even a HDTV, but I do have a Blu-ray drive in my PC and about 10 movies. It takes about 5 seconds from the time I put the disc in the drive to the time the movie starts playing. About 3 seconds of that is taken up by the drive identifying the disc and the other 2 seconds is the time it takes for Cyberlink PowerDVD to verify the DRM keys and start playing.
This is on a system with a 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo with 1GB of RAM, which is fairly comparable to most low-end to mid-range systems sold today.
I currently use a 24" LCD running at 1920x1200 as my main monitor and the difference between a good Blu-Ray disc and a upconverted DVD is huge. A full 1080p stream looks amazingly sharp and contains a large amount of fine detail. After watching a Blu-ray disc, DVDs look soft and appear lacking in detail, so much so that I have found myself watching far more Blu-ray discs than DVDs as of late.
I suspect many of the people that have trouble telling the difference between an upconverted DVD and a Blu-ray disc are either using a poor quality display or are sitting far enough away that many of the details are lost. Since I use my PC and monitor as my TV I probably tend to sit a bit closer to the display than most, which may explain why the faults in DVDs are more apparent on my setup.
I seam to remember that some of the early HD-DVD players were actually PCs running a form of Linux. I have to wonder if most of the standalone Blu-ray players are really PCs in disguise, which means the the long loading times people are reporting may be caused by having to wait for the player to boot and not caused by the JVM or verifying/decoding the DRM streams. If that is the case, newer players may be able to fix this problem by using more specialized hardware, rather general purpose x86 PC hardware.
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Microsoft's part of problem is that rather than saying "Don't do that - fix your program so it can run under a normal user account", they made it so you can run as administrator, and then tried to intercept user actions that might hose things up.
That is the very problem that UAC solves very effectively in Vista. UAC makes all applications run as a regular limited user unless that application is explicitly granted full administrative privileges through a UAC dialog.
Under Vista if you only run well-behaved applications you will almost never see a UAC prompt. Software that insists on running with full administrative privileges causes a UAC prompt to appear.
Users complain about the prompts and disable UAC without thinking about the fact that by doing so they loose a very effective layer of security. When UAC is disabled all applications run with full administrative privileges whether they need it or not.
I don't have a standalone Blu-ray player or even a HDTV, but I do have a Blu-ray drive in my PC and about 10 movies. It takes about 5 seconds from the time I put the disc in the drive to the time the movie starts playing. About 3 seconds of that is taken up by the drive identifying the disc and the other 2 seconds is the time it takes for Cyberlink PowerDVD to verify the DRM keys and start playing. This is on a system with a 2.8GHz Core 2 Duo with 1GB of RAM, which is fairly comparable to most low-end to mid-range systems sold today. I currently use a 24" LCD running at 1920x1200 as my main monitor and the difference between a good Blu-Ray disc and a upconverted DVD is huge. A full 1080p stream looks amazingly sharp and contains a large amount of fine detail. After watching a Blu-ray disc, DVDs look soft and appear lacking in detail, so much so that I have found myself watching far more Blu-ray discs than DVDs as of late. I suspect many of the people that have trouble telling the difference between an upconverted DVD and a Blu-ray disc are either using a poor quality display or are sitting far enough away that many of the details are lost. Since I use my PC and monitor as my TV I probably tend to sit a bit closer to the display than most, which may explain why the faults in DVDs are more apparent on my setup. I seam to remember that some of the early HD-DVD players were actually PCs running a form of Linux. I have to wonder if most of the standalone Blu-ray players are really PCs in disguise, which means the the long loading times people are reporting may be caused by having to wait for the player to boot and not caused by the JVM or verifying/decoding the DRM streams. If that is the case, newer players may be able to fix this problem by using more specialized hardware, rather general purpose x86 PC hardware.