And you don't think Microsoft could twist arms hard enough, if it wanted to, to kill the DRM?
No, I don't. They're not even close to having that sort of clout in that market segment.
Most people still get their media fix from standalone, dedicated devices like DVD players, CD players, iPods, satellite receivers, etc, etc - and will continue to do for quite some time yet (with HD-DVD Players, Blu-Ray players, etc, etc).
If you think *those* devices aren't going to be DRMed to the eyeballs for the "high def revolution", I've got a bridge to sell you.
In summary:
* current and future proportion of people who regularly access premium content via their general purpose (or even media-specific) computer: relatively small, tending towards insignificant.
* current and future proportion of people who regularly access premium content via standalone , purpose-built devices: everyone else.
If you think Microsft can stand alone against the wants of everyone who currently doesn't use Windows MCE (or similar), you're dreaming. Apple had the iPod as a bargaining chip to win concessions from the media cartels (and they may have actually gotten away with it, although that is still very much up in the air). Microsoft only had Windows MCE, which isn't in the same league - hell, not even playing the same game - when it comes to ubiquity and accessibility.
But if it is true, and his shiny new computer stops working because of some stupid DRM, then negative word-of-mouth will kill Vista, at least for home users.
Which would be a pyrrhic victory at best. *DRM* is the real villain and proper copyright reform (if not complete replacement) is the real victory.
I'm going to tell them who it was who sold them a windowless room and told them it was a wonderful vista. I'm probably going to tell them up whose rear ends they can shove their copies of Windows Vista, a task I'm pretty sure they'll want to do rather violently. Then I'm going to name half a dozen OS products that fit their needs beautifully, products without digital restrictions management (DRM) inhibiting their right to fair use, and not a one of which is a Microsoft product.
What are you going to tell them if their needs revolve around the high-definition DRM-encumbered content that's going to be basically ubiquitous inside a decade ?
"Sorry, you can't watch the latest releases of Idol, Survivor and James Bond, because none of the software that will do it coincides with my personal morals."
I agree. Copyright is an outdated, broken concept.
If I pay for a dvd/cd what does it matter if I make one or a 1000 copies as long as I do not give them away or sell them.
DRM does not infringe on your physical property "rights".
What does it fucking matter if I watch it on a computer, tv with componet connections or his precous HDMI interface or what ever.
Ask the copyright holder. They're the ones saying you can't do the things you want to do, based on the rights they think copyright endows them. You may disagree, but thus far the law does not.
"Hey guys, I know this computer is only supposed to be used to control the MRI machine, but let's throw our MP3 collections on it! ROCK OUT WITH YOUR COCK OUT!"
What happens at the MRI machine is a relatively small aspect of the "medical imaging" workflow.
Huh. From what I've seen the vast majority of 3-5 year old hardware doesn't had a gigabyte of RAM. You're lucky if it has 512 megs, which is quite sufficient to run the vast majority of Windows 2000/XP apps.
Maybe on the low end. I think you'll find a surprising number of people upgrade RAM.
There's also quite a few machines out there with integrated graphics controllers that have no prayer of running Aero.
Which won't stop them running Vista, or running Vista with a dirt-cheap upgrade.
Huh.. So that would be part of the "vast majority of PCs can't take advantage of Vista" statement. So exactly how is stating what's true (that PCs would need upgraded hardware to run Vista) now considered lying?
Because the implication is that to get any use of Vista *at all* you need a completely new machine, since _anything_ more than ~18 months old it utterly worthless and could never handle it. So, while it's not strictly lying in the "completely wrong and knows it" sense, but more in the "incredibly inaccurate and exaggerated and knows it sense". Kind of like that whole "weapons of mass destruction" thing.
Basically, any P3-class or faster machine has sufficient CPU grunt to run - and "benefit from" - Vista. _Some_ of them might require a memory upgrade. _Some_ of them might require a video card upgrade. But the implication from the article is clearly that if your PC is more than a year or two old, you'll need to go out and spend hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars on a new machine to get any sort of value from Vista. This is grossly deceptive, to the point that I am quite happy to call it lying, since in all likelihood for any remotely recent machine the all you'll need is a hundred bucks (US) worth of upgrades.
Furthermore, when you actually start narrowing it down to the kinds of customers who are _likely_ to be upgrading to Vista on existing machines - relatively advanced users with relatively high-end or expandable machines (rather than the stereotypical "average consumer" with his unexpandable $500 PC from a few years ago) - the suggestion that they will have to buy an entirely new computer becomes even sillier.
What a strange statement. "No one thinks the new product is all that great... therefore the old product must be REALLY great!". So you honestly don't think it's possible to improve on XP?
No, that's not what I said at all.
Vista does improve on XP in basically every way, with scales ranging from minor to massive. Given that, for people to be giving Vista such a "yawn", it must mean they're so happy with XP that these improvements simply aren't compelling. That, to me, brands XP as an excellent system if, ~5 years down the track its replacement - with significant improvements - isn't particularly compelling to consumers.
Funny. I thought they were both operating systems that ran software on desktops.
That's the view from orbit. It's somewhat disingenuous to compare two peices of software which are about 95% different and were targeted at quite different markets.
One isn't an embedded OS and the other a server OS.
From a software perspective, they're at least that different. Indeed, about the only thing they have in common is some APIs.
we'll see, but the reviews certainly don't show that so far.
That's because the reviews do little more than install it, flick a few windows around with the mouse, go "ooh, ah" at the flashy GUI effects and leave it at that. Vista reviews generally don't go into the ins and outs of kernel mode vs user mode drivers, virtual memory enhancements, CPU (and I/O) scheduling improvements, how much better the new display system is than anything else out there, etc, etc.
I remember windows 3.11. It was a disaster.
You remember wrong. Windows 3.11 was a significant success, a non-trivial upgrade (should have been at least Windows 3.5) and a measurable improvement over Windows 3.1 - and especiall
I'd be very pleased to find out that some other alternative is true, of course.
Or it's a subtle combination of factors that these "all or nothing" hypotheses don't really capture (or do, but ignore, because they're not as "cool").
For example: the frequency of technological civilisations falls somewhere between the "practically unheard of" and "one around every corner" extremes that are generally talked about, *BUT* this is then tempered by them all running along roughly the same timeline for developing technology (+/- a few million years) and the problem that making a working, self-replicating probe is a really, really, really hard problem (that is, much harder than we already think it is).
Maybe there are a lot of Civs out there that have made self-replicating probes, but none of them have managed to get one working well enough for it to get more than, say, 5 iterations down the track before the "new" probes are functionally useless ?
Maybe by the time a Civ has the technology to reasonably assemble such probes, they've realised that doing so would probably be a risk not worth the reward ?
Maybe they get built but then only deployed on very small scales (eg: no more than two iterations, travel no further than X away from your origin point before self-destructing) to mitigate some of the inherent risk ?
There really is a whole spectrum of possibilities between "we are alone (or effectively alone)" and "we are going to die as soon as we become advanced enough for "everyone else" to notice us".
Probably not, by the sound of it, but it certainly appears to me that the purpose of copyright is to make "intellectual property" behave like physical property (eg: scarcity is artificially imposed on "IP" to inflate its value)
Again I disagree and would quote article 1, section 8 of the constitution of the United States. If nothing else, the 'limited time' intention differs from physical property.
The objective during that "limited time" is to give the copyright owner as much control as possible - and "limited time" is definitely becoming less and less "limited".
Then there are other countries' copyright - eg: in most of Europe copyright is considered a fundamental human right, not an artificial, legal privilege.
I think this is a misunderstanding; that's exactly what I meant by 'in the public domain' (and I think that is the legal meaning too). It doesn't mean that you can force people to make copies for you; only that the work is no longer under copyright, and so the restrictions of copyright law no longer apply to that work. Once a work is in the public domain it no longer has a copyright holder.
In that case I don't see what your argument is. The DRM is a proprty of the content that the publisher chose to set when he released the work. That - at some distant point in the future - copyright _law_ would no longer give the work any protection is a completely separate and independent issue to the DRM that a particular _work_ has had applied to it. Copyright law just says that if you can get a copy of a work once the copyright has expired, you are (essentially) free to do whatever you want with it. it does not say that you are _entitled_ to a copy of a work once its copyright has expired (eg: by having its DRM protection stripped for you).
Not so. Take the example of Microsoft's Zune, which applies DRM to works regardless of the copyright holder's wishes - and indeed in cases where the copyright holder has explicitly forbidden it (some Creative Commons licences).
Sorry, I'm not familiar with the Zune's operation - are you saying it won't play un-DRMed media at all ?
Even if it won't, that's still just a bad implementation, not an inherent feature. I would offer iTunes as a counterpoint (which supports DRM restrictions, but does not impose them unnecessarily).
Or again, a work which is not under copyright because it has passed into the public domain - most DRM software will still apply restrictions regardless of the copyright status of the work.
Indeed, but, as I said, this is an issue independent of copyright protection. The "public domain" is only relevant to whether or not a work is protected by copyright, not DRM.
So I think it is Adobe's software that has the DRM restriction.
But it's *not*. You even *agree* that it is a property of the PDF file itself:
You can create PDF files with a 'no print' bit set, [...]
Now, the software can choose whether or not to respect the DRM directives - some PDF readers don't - but the point is that the "no print" bit is set in the *PDF file*. It's the software that _enforces_ the DRM, but its the content that has the DRM directives in it in the first place to be enforced. The PDF reader will not stop you printing a file that doesn't have the "no print" flag set.
Getting back to "real" content (music, movies, etc) what is going to happen, is the content will be encrypted and only "official" players will get a decryption key. One of the conditions of getting the key, of course, will be that the player "must" respect the DRM "flags" set by the content publisher - so writing software that ignores them, like certain PDF programs do, will not be possible for legitimate (and probably in the near future, "legal") players.
I must admit the only place I can see relief from DRM in the near future is from within the legal system itself, in some fash
Why would you send your resume as a Word doc instead of a pdf?
Because that's what job ads usually ask for. Job ads usually ask for it because the software that agencies use to search through your Resume and flag keywords (to decide whether or not a *real person* actually reads the thing) presumably only works with Word documents.
I'm not so sure your claim is correct. I know for sure that OS X runs decently enough on a 350ghz G4 Mac (mine is 6 years old).
If you think OS X runs "decently enough" on a 350Mhz G4 (and having used such a machine in the past, as well as being the present owner of a 1Ghz iBook, I'd have to say in my opinion it wouldn't even come close) then Vista will run "decently enough" on a similarly aged PC (which would be ca. 700Mhz - 1Ghz P3/Athlon). I keep such a machine for playing old DOS games and I used RC2 on it for a solid month to test out the performance. It wasn't what I'd call "fast", bit it was quite usable - only marginally less responsive than my mum's G5 iMac.
I doubt ANY PC that is 6 years old will be able to run Vista, but I could be mistaken.
The slowest box I've tried Vista on was a P3/450Mhz, 512MB RAM Compaq notebook. I haven't felt compelled to reinstall it with XP or 2000 - but all the machine does it sit next to the couch for idle web browsing and email, so it doesn't see a lot of use.
p.The simple fact is Vista's hardware requirements are neither unreasonable nor difficult to meet, even if you are upgrading an existing machine that is quite old (5-odd years).
Wouldn't it be even cooler if it weren't crippled? I mean, imagine actually getting access to every feature of the OS on your machine just buy getting the basic license.
It certainly would, but capitalism is a needy bitch.
Does anyone know why Vista is such a resource hog?
It's not.
Vista is quite usable on a P3 class machine with a gig of RAM and somewhat modern video card. It's certainly no _worse_ than OS X or equivalent Linux distributions in terms of hardware requirements.
Explain to me please, why doesn't Microsoft sell their so-called OS in parts?
Because the miniscule proportion of customers who would be interested in a version of Windows, for example, "without GUI" do not make up for the extra support and development costs of providing it.
From what I've heard of Vista so far, the improvements aren't on anywhere near the same level. There's some nice under-the-hood stuff, but I doubt the average user would ever even notice it.
I'm confused. You criticise Vista because the bulk of its improvements are "under the hood stuff", but also praise Windows 95 despite most of its improvements being of a similar nature...
No, I feel that the reviewer was expecting more from 5 years of development, and not to be burdened by hefty hardware requirements to take advantage of the new improvements.
Given the _massive_ amount of improvements in Vista and the fact that it runs quite usably on 3 - 5 year old hardware, then, it would appear he has somewhat unrealistic expectations.
He compares it to OS X because it's gotten steadily better over the past 5 years, where the offerings from Microsoft, a much larger and richer company isn't really worthy of 5 years of development efforts.
The changes from XP to Vista are at least equal to, if not greater than, the changes that Apple have done to get from NeXTSTEP to OS X 10.4 (something that's taken them roughly twice as long).
Really I think the article sounds quite honest. He mentions that there's some improvements, but the majority of people don't have the hardware to take advantage of the improvements.
Which is flat-out lying, given all you need is a Ghz+ PC with 1G of RAM and a US$30 video card to do so (a high-end box ca. 2000 - 2001 - although you would likely need a (very cheap) video card upgrade for Aero since it uses features that didn't exist at the time). Vista is as usable on hardware from a given timeframe as OS X is on Macs from a similar timeframe.
Ultimately I think it indicates a larger problem at Microsoft. It's been more than 5 years since XP, the last desktop OS from Microsoft. That's pretty horrible considering that previously Microsoft has released a new desktop OS every about every 2 or 2.5 years (3.1 in 92, 3.11 in 93, 95 in 95, 98 in 98, 98 SE in 99, ME in 2000, WT2K in 2000, XP in 2001).
Strange, it seems to me the relative yawns that Vista is getting are a glowing compliment to just how good XP is.
Look at all the major changes in previous 5 year spans. Compare Windows 3.11 in 93 to Windows 98 in 98, or Windows 95 in 95 to Windows 2000 in 2000 and you'll see what I'm talking about.
The second comparison isn't really valid (fundamentally different products), but XP -> Vista is *easily* as big a change as Windows 3.11 -> Windows 98.
Hell, compare the initial (really awfull) release of OSX 10.0 to the decent release of 10.4 only 4 years later. Sure there's a lot more to improve in OS X since it was so totally new.. but the fact that Apple can pull off more in less time doesn't speak well for Microsoft.
Firstly, OS X isn't "new" any more than Vista is "new". Secondly, there is precious little evidence to support an assertion of Apple "pulling off more in less time".
Slashdot Mirror
And you don't think Microsoft could twist arms hard enough, if it wanted to, to kill the DRM?
No, I don't. They're not even close to having that sort of clout in that market segment.
Most people still get their media fix from standalone, dedicated devices like DVD players, CD players, iPods, satellite receivers, etc, etc - and will continue to do for quite some time yet (with HD-DVD Players, Blu-Ray players, etc, etc).
If you think *those* devices aren't going to be DRMed to the eyeballs for the "high def revolution", I've got a bridge to sell you.
In summary:
* current and future proportion of people who regularly access premium content via their general purpose (or even media-specific) computer: relatively small, tending towards insignificant.
* current and future proportion of people who regularly access premium content via standalone , purpose-built devices: everyone else.
If you think Microsft can stand alone against the wants of everyone who currently doesn't use Windows MCE (or similar), you're dreaming. Apple had the iPod as a bargaining chip to win concessions from the media cartels (and they may have actually gotten away with it, although that is still very much up in the air). Microsoft only had Windows MCE, which isn't in the same league - hell, not even playing the same game - when it comes to ubiquity and accessibility.
But if it is true, and his shiny new computer stops working because of some stupid DRM, then negative word-of-mouth will kill Vista, at least for home users.
Which would be a pyrrhic victory at best. *DRM* is the real villain and proper copyright reform (if not complete replacement) is the real victory.
I'm going to tell them who it was who sold them a windowless room and told them it was a wonderful vista. I'm probably going to tell them up whose rear ends they can shove their copies of Windows Vista, a task I'm pretty sure they'll want to do rather violently. Then I'm going to name half a dozen OS products that fit their needs beautifully, products without digital restrictions management (DRM) inhibiting their right to fair use, and not a one of which is a Microsoft product.
What are you going to tell them if their needs revolve around the high-definition DRM-encumbered content that's going to be basically ubiquitous inside a decade ?
"Sorry, you can't watch the latest releases of Idol, Survivor and James Bond, because none of the software that will do it coincides with my personal morals."
Bull fucking Shit!
I agree. Copyright is an outdated, broken concept.
If I pay for a dvd/cd what does it matter if I make one or a 1000 copies as long as I do not give them away or sell them.
DRM does not infringe on your physical property "rights".
What does it fucking matter if I watch it on a computer, tv with componet connections or his precous HDMI interface or what ever.
Ask the copyright holder. They're the ones saying you can't do the things you want to do, based on the rights they think copyright endows them. You may disagree, but thus far the law does not.
So I will be able to play it on my Linux system then ?
Only if someone writes some suitable software to do so.
So, probably not.
I actually think that "M$" makes someone "sound" like they're making a somewhat sublime point about the company's greed [...]
I do not believe this word means what you think it means.
"M$" is about as "sublime" as "crApple".
Uh, they own the copyright, and I own the disc. They can't have their cake and eat it too.
DRM doesn't stop you doing anything with the disc.
Less freedom = better quality?
Given the Slashdot mantra of "standards-based products are better", apparently it does.
The company that abandons the users on older machines, to help their customers sell new machines.
Your assumption is broken.
So why again I do not own the hardware in my equipment to be used HOW I WANT TO USE IT?
You can. You just can't do it with someone else's copyright material.
"Hey guys, I know this computer is only supposed to be used to control the MRI machine, but let's throw our MP3 collections on it! ROCK OUT WITH YOUR COCK OUT!"
What happens at the MRI machine is a relatively small aspect of the "medical imaging" workflow.
1. The original paper was mostly FUD.
2. Vista only does what the copyright holders tell it to do.
3. If you don't want your life negatively impacted by DRM-encumbered content, don't buy it.
Who decides if it requires image constraint?
The copyright holder.
Who else except me has such a call to make on my private property?
The person who actually owns the content (hint: it's not you).
Hard links anyone? They've been around for nearly 40 years.
Hard links don't work across filesystems (or drives, in Windows-speak. or Volumes, in Mac-speak).
Huh. From what I've seen the vast majority of 3-5 year old hardware doesn't had a gigabyte of RAM. You're lucky if it has 512 megs, which is quite sufficient to run the vast majority of Windows 2000/XP apps.
Maybe on the low end. I think you'll find a surprising number of people upgrade RAM.
There's also quite a few machines out there with integrated graphics controllers that have no prayer of running Aero.
Which won't stop them running Vista, or running Vista with a dirt-cheap upgrade.
Huh.. So that would be part of the "vast majority of PCs can't take advantage of Vista" statement. So exactly how is stating what's true (that PCs would need upgraded hardware to run Vista) now considered lying?
Because the implication is that to get any use of Vista *at all* you need a completely new machine, since _anything_ more than ~18 months old it utterly worthless and could never handle it. So, while it's not strictly lying in the "completely wrong and knows it" sense, but more in the "incredibly inaccurate and exaggerated and knows it sense". Kind of like that whole "weapons of mass destruction" thing.
Basically, any P3-class or faster machine has sufficient CPU grunt to run - and "benefit from" - Vista. _Some_ of them might require a memory upgrade. _Some_ of them might require a video card upgrade. But the implication from the article is clearly that if your PC is more than a year or two old, you'll need to go out and spend hundreds (if not thousands) of dollars on a new machine to get any sort of value from Vista. This is grossly deceptive, to the point that I am quite happy to call it lying, since in all likelihood for any remotely recent machine the all you'll need is a hundred bucks (US) worth of upgrades.
Furthermore, when you actually start narrowing it down to the kinds of customers who are _likely_ to be upgrading to Vista on existing machines - relatively advanced users with relatively high-end or expandable machines (rather than the stereotypical "average consumer" with his unexpandable $500 PC from a few years ago) - the suggestion that they will have to buy an entirely new computer becomes even sillier.
What a strange statement. "No one thinks the new product is all that great... therefore the old product must be REALLY great!". So you honestly don't think it's possible to improve on XP?
No, that's not what I said at all.
Vista does improve on XP in basically every way, with scales ranging from minor to massive. Given that, for people to be giving Vista such a "yawn", it must mean they're so happy with XP that these improvements simply aren't compelling. That, to me, brands XP as an excellent system if, ~5 years down the track its replacement - with significant improvements - isn't particularly compelling to consumers.
Funny. I thought they were both operating systems that ran software on desktops.
That's the view from orbit. It's somewhat disingenuous to compare two peices of software which are about 95% different and were targeted at quite different markets.
One isn't an embedded OS and the other a server OS.
From a software perspective, they're at least that different. Indeed, about the only thing they have in common is some APIs.
we'll see, but the reviews certainly don't show that so far.
That's because the reviews do little more than install it, flick a few windows around with the mouse, go "ooh, ah" at the flashy GUI effects and leave it at that. Vista reviews generally don't go into the ins and outs of kernel mode vs user mode drivers, virtual memory enhancements, CPU (and I/O) scheduling improvements, how much better the new display system is than anything else out there, etc, etc.
I remember windows 3.11. It was a disaster.
You remember wrong. Windows 3.11 was a significant success, a non-trivial upgrade (should have been at least Windows 3.5) and a measurable improvement over Windows 3.1 - and especiall
I'd be very pleased to find out that some other alternative is true, of course.
Or it's a subtle combination of factors that these "all or nothing" hypotheses don't really capture (or do, but ignore, because they're not as "cool").
For example: the frequency of technological civilisations falls somewhere between the "practically unheard of" and "one around every corner" extremes that are generally talked about, *BUT* this is then tempered by them all running along roughly the same timeline for developing technology (+/- a few million years) and the problem that making a working, self-replicating probe is a really, really, really hard problem (that is, much harder than we already think it is).
Maybe there are a lot of Civs out there that have made self-replicating probes, but none of them have managed to get one working well enough for it to get more than, say, 5 iterations down the track before the "new" probes are functionally useless ?
Maybe by the time a Civ has the technology to reasonably assemble such probes, they've realised that doing so would probably be a risk not worth the reward ?
Maybe they get built but then only deployed on very small scales (eg: no more than two iterations, travel no further than X away from your origin point before self-destructing) to mitigate some of the inherent risk ?
There really is a whole spectrum of possibilities between "we are alone (or effectively alone)" and "we are going to die as soon as we become advanced enough for "everyone else" to notice us".
I think we're not going to agree on this.
Probably not, by the sound of it, but it certainly appears to me that the purpose of copyright is to make "intellectual property" behave like physical property (eg: scarcity is artificially imposed on "IP" to inflate its value)
Again I disagree and would quote article 1, section 8 of the constitution of the United States. If nothing else, the 'limited time' intention differs from physical property.
The objective during that "limited time" is to give the copyright owner as much control as possible - and "limited time" is definitely becoming less and less "limited".
Then there are other countries' copyright - eg: in most of Europe copyright is considered a fundamental human right, not an artificial, legal privilege.
I think this is a misunderstanding; that's exactly what I meant by 'in the public domain' (and I think that is the legal meaning too). It doesn't mean that you can force people to make copies for you; only that the work is no longer under copyright, and so the restrictions of copyright law no longer apply to that work. Once a work is in the public domain it no longer has a copyright holder.
In that case I don't see what your argument is. The DRM is a proprty of the content that the publisher chose to set when he released the work. That - at some distant point in the future - copyright _law_ would no longer give the work any protection is a completely separate and independent issue to the DRM that a particular _work_ has had applied to it. Copyright law just says that if you can get a copy of a work once the copyright has expired, you are (essentially) free to do whatever you want with it. it does not say that you are _entitled_ to a copy of a work once its copyright has expired (eg: by having its DRM protection stripped for you).
Not so. Take the example of Microsoft's Zune, which applies DRM to works regardless of the copyright holder's wishes - and indeed in cases where the copyright holder has explicitly forbidden it (some Creative Commons licences).
Sorry, I'm not familiar with the Zune's operation - are you saying it won't play un-DRMed media at all ?
Even if it won't, that's still just a bad implementation, not an inherent feature. I would offer iTunes as a counterpoint (which supports DRM restrictions, but does not impose them unnecessarily).
Or again, a work which is not under copyright because it has passed into the public domain - most DRM software will still apply restrictions regardless of the copyright status of the work.
Indeed, but, as I said, this is an issue independent of copyright protection. The "public domain" is only relevant to whether or not a work is protected by copyright, not DRM.
So I think it is Adobe's software that has the DRM restriction.
But it's *not*. You even *agree* that it is a property of the PDF file itself:
Now, the software can choose whether or not to respect the DRM directives - some PDF readers don't - but the point is that the "no print" bit is set in the *PDF file*. It's the software that _enforces_ the DRM, but its the content that has the DRM directives in it in the first place to be enforced. The PDF reader will not stop you printing a file that doesn't have the "no print" flag set.
Getting back to "real" content (music, movies, etc) what is going to happen, is the content will be encrypted and only "official" players will get a decryption key. One of the conditions of getting the key, of course, will be that the player "must" respect the DRM "flags" set by the content publisher - so writing software that ignores them, like certain PDF programs do, will not be possible for legitimate (and probably in the near future, "legal") players.
I must admit the only place I can see relief from DRM in the near future is from within the legal system itself, in some fash
Why would you send your resume as a Word doc instead of a pdf?
Because that's what job ads usually ask for. Job ads usually ask for it because the software that agencies use to search through your Resume and flag keywords (to decide whether or not a *real person* actually reads the thing) presumably only works with Word documents.
I'm not so sure your claim is correct. I know for sure that OS X runs decently enough on a 350ghz G4 Mac (mine is 6 years old).
If you think OS X runs "decently enough" on a 350Mhz G4 (and having used such a machine in the past, as well as being the present owner of a 1Ghz iBook, I'd have to say in my opinion it wouldn't even come close) then Vista will run "decently enough" on a similarly aged PC (which would be ca. 700Mhz - 1Ghz P3/Athlon). I keep such a machine for playing old DOS games and I used RC2 on it for a solid month to test out the performance. It wasn't what I'd call "fast", bit it was quite usable - only marginally less responsive than my mum's G5 iMac.
I doubt ANY PC that is 6 years old will be able to run Vista, but I could be mistaken.
The slowest box I've tried Vista on was a P3/450Mhz, 512MB RAM Compaq notebook. I haven't felt compelled to reinstall it with XP or 2000 - but all the machine does it sit next to the couch for idle web browsing and email, so it doesn't see a lot of use. p.The simple fact is Vista's hardware requirements are neither unreasonable nor difficult to meet, even if you are upgrading an existing machine that is quite old (5-odd years).
Wouldn't it be even cooler if it weren't crippled? I mean, imagine actually getting access to every feature of the OS on your machine just buy getting the basic license.
It certainly would, but capitalism is a needy bitch.
Does anyone know why Vista is such a resource hog?
It's not.
Vista is quite usable on a P3 class machine with a gig of RAM and somewhat modern video card. It's certainly no _worse_ than OS X or equivalent Linux distributions in terms of hardware requirements.
Instead of obeying the instructions of the OWNER of the media.
What the owner of the media wants is irrelevant. What the owner of the copyright wants, is what is important.
Would you argue that because I own a CD full of GPLed source code I can integrate that code into as many closed-source programs as I want ?
The DRM embedded in Vista has been well hashed here [...]
No, the DRM embedded in Vista has been covered here with levels of FUD that even IBM, in their heyday, would have blushed about.
If you're here hoping learn objective, factual information about Windows, you're in the wrong place.
Explain to me please, why doesn't Microsoft sell their so-called OS in parts?
Because the miniscule proportion of customers who would be interested in a version of Windows, for example, "without GUI" do not make up for the extra support and development costs of providing it.
From what I've heard of Vista so far, the improvements aren't on anywhere near the same level. There's some nice under-the-hood stuff, but I doubt the average user would ever even notice it.
I'm confused. You criticise Vista because the bulk of its improvements are "under the hood stuff", but also praise Windows 95 despite most of its improvements being of a similar nature...
No, I feel that the reviewer was expecting more from 5 years of development, and not to be burdened by hefty hardware requirements to take advantage of the new improvements.
Given the _massive_ amount of improvements in Vista and the fact that it runs quite usably on 3 - 5 year old hardware, then, it would appear he has somewhat unrealistic expectations.
He compares it to OS X because it's gotten steadily better over the past 5 years, where the offerings from Microsoft, a much larger and richer company isn't really worthy of 5 years of development efforts.
The changes from XP to Vista are at least equal to, if not greater than, the changes that Apple have done to get from NeXTSTEP to OS X 10.4 (something that's taken them roughly twice as long).
Really I think the article sounds quite honest. He mentions that there's some improvements, but the majority of people don't have the hardware to take advantage of the improvements.
Which is flat-out lying, given all you need is a Ghz+ PC with 1G of RAM and a US$30 video card to do so (a high-end box ca. 2000 - 2001 - although you would likely need a (very cheap) video card upgrade for Aero since it uses features that didn't exist at the time). Vista is as usable on hardware from a given timeframe as OS X is on Macs from a similar timeframe.
Ultimately I think it indicates a larger problem at Microsoft. It's been more than 5 years since XP, the last desktop OS from Microsoft. That's pretty horrible considering that previously Microsoft has released a new desktop OS every about every 2 or 2.5 years (3.1 in 92, 3.11 in 93, 95 in 95, 98 in 98, 98 SE in 99, ME in 2000, WT2K in 2000, XP in 2001).
Strange, it seems to me the relative yawns that Vista is getting are a glowing compliment to just how good XP is.
Look at all the major changes in previous 5 year spans. Compare Windows 3.11 in 93 to Windows 98 in 98, or Windows 95 in 95 to Windows 2000 in 2000 and you'll see what I'm talking about.
The second comparison isn't really valid (fundamentally different products), but XP -> Vista is *easily* as big a change as Windows 3.11 -> Windows 98.
Hell, compare the initial (really awfull) release of OSX 10.0 to the decent release of 10.4 only 4 years later. Sure there's a lot more to improve in OS X since it was so totally new.. but the fact that Apple can pull off more in less time doesn't speak well for Microsoft.
Firstly, OS X isn't "new" any more than Vista is "new". Secondly, there is precious little evidence to support an assertion of Apple "pulling off more in less time".