Have you ever been involved in actual product development? I don't know how many times I've seen people get the final result out the door while the second hand ticks.
Yeah, they may have gone over it dozens or hundreds of times -- these people are often perfectionists. That's why the get the big bucks, but if some unexpected glitch causes Vista to spuriously trash the quality of your product on the final production run, 5 minutes before the courier has to get back to his truck, even catching the glitch might not be enough to save your ass.
And it doesn't have to happen always, either. One mangled video might be all it takes to trash the reputation of an up-and coming company. They'll never have the chance to figure out what hit them.
In theory, once the DRM is cracked, either Linux or Windows should be able to do whatever they want with it, but the DMCA says that you'll be looking over your shoulder a lot if you're intending to put the results of that crack out in public view.
DRM will mostly just prevent honest people from doing dishonest things -- unfortunately, those aren't the kind of people that you have to worry about most.
There 'always' have been, and probably ever will be professional pirates who will break DRM in ways that Microsoft's '(un)trustable computing' will never catch. I still remember the friend of mine who, in 1982 had a cracked copy of a 'heavily protected' game, 2 weeks before it was even released.
Oh yeah, DRM's gonna stop him, today..... Yep. Yep. yep.
and there is usually no effect on content which is doesn't require provider authorization.
Unfortunately, there may also be situations in which a driver isn't able to prove that it's got clean media and will, therefore set a 'trouble bit' to indicate that it's 'worried'. This can cause the degradation of the affected media, whether it's properly DRMed or not.
Part of the problem is that secure DRM is going to essentially require that every step in the chain can prove that it's handling the data correctly. According to at least one document, issues of uncertainty are to be resolved by presuming the worst (that someone is attempting to game the system). Under such uncertain conditions, loss of quality is a serious possibility -- whether the data being processed really is protected or not.
A really bad case might be a compressed or encrypted backup data stream causing a media device to think that it's getting 'cracked' DRM media. The device 'degrades' the "media", resulting in the irreversible scrambling of your backup. Something like that may be rare, but it only has to happen once or twice to critical data for a company to get a really sour taste in their mouth.
No. You can have unprotected files, but there are certain conditions under which Vista (and it's drivers) will "magically" downgrade the quality of any media going across certain paths. Mostly, it should only occur if you're trying to use protected media under 'improper conditions', but sometimes it can occur if the system just thinks that 'something may be wrong'.
That something wrong might be you trying to tamper with the DRM system, or it might just be because a capacitor someplace got too warm and went out of spec.
Possible worst-case scenarios are: your business partner sends you a video clip in the email, not knowing that it's DRMed. You open the email while waiting for the final render of your $.5M video clip, and the presence of the 'unauthorized media' causes Vista to degrade the quality of the render for 30 seconds. If you're lucky and catch the problem, your QC people may spend hours unsuccessfully trying to track down the source of the problem.
More ominously, the installation of a new piece of equipment next door (say, an X-Ray machine) might cause a finicky board to sporadically set the 'trouble bit' and cause degradation whenever the new equipment is running. It could take you months to figure out why supposedly perfect renders go south at random times..... and everybody involved in the creation of the errant drivers or hardware will point to the EULA that tells you to expect these things to happen from time to time.
Unprotected media might be unaffected by Vista DRM, but the only way to find out for sure is to risk your (possibly multi-million dollar) project and see if it turns out OK.
Part of the problem is that when, where and why Vista will degrade your media in transit isn't (and can't be) properly documented. It depends among other things, on security by obscurity. If people understood precisely how the system worked, they might be able to circumvent it... so if your income depends on the quality of your media not being degraded, you're going to be holding your breath the entire time that you're using Vista. You might get away unscathed, or you might not.
If it only 'rarely' degrades your 'unprotected' media (say 1% of the time) that means that, in a 90 minute video you're going to find 1 minute of degraded video times the number of times that you duplicate or edit your product while using it. -- and if you don't notice that a critical part of your video got squashed in the final downmix before you rushed your (hopefully) award-winning project into the hands of the waiting courier, you're gonna be soooooo unhappy 3 days down the road when you finally recover from the rush and figure out what happened.
That's the worry that Vista's "trusted computing" will create for high-end content producers.
Well, unless it's a Windows box (in which case, it probably just crashes nightly:-), who'd be the stupid idiot who insists on turning the mail server off every night at 11PM? It's been a long, long time since any machine/OS that could be considered server quality needed nightly maintenance.
Somebody in your school's IT group needs a cluebat.
OO is free, so I suggest that you download a copy and find out for yourself.
(( then come back and tell us how it went. ))
That's the nice thing about Open Source and Free software -- It doesn't cost you anything to do a quick test, (and you always have th choice of fixing any deal-busters on your own dime).
Just out of curiosity how well do OOo Basic and Calc handle Excel documents with hevy duty VB content?
I don't think that the situation heavily favours Windows at this point. It's not entirely clear. They have a couple of core applications that are currently Windows only. The path to go will depend a lot on what the core applications are, whether there are Linux equivalents, whether the core applications will run well on Wine, or VNC, and how many people use those core applications.
It may be, for example, that 75% of the office could move to Linux and Open Office today, while the other 25% might have to either stay with Windows in the interim or use VNC or Cygwin on Linux with a longer delay while a more permanent solution is worked on.
If, on the other hand, 90% of the company uses the critical applications, they are designed in such a way that running them on an emulator or network isn't feasible and there's no Linux equivalent, then you've got a slam dunk for staying with Windows.
As with any situation where you're depending on a 2 paragraph description of a complex situation, there's a lot of detail missing that would likely make a critical difference.
I think that this is really an educational campaign, because MS has done a really good job of hiding from people what could happen to them, and their computer, if they blindly upgrade to Vista.
Micorosoft has also done a really good job of hiding from people the fact that FLOSS is even a real and legitimate choice for many users.
There's no fear in the end user because almost nobody actually reads the EULA to figure out what MS says they're agreeing to, and even fewer can understand the EULA in any event.
From what I've seen people using Windows-64 have had far more problems than people running Linux. Linux 64 bit support has been out for a long time now and is pretty stable.
XP-64 seems to have all sorts of driver problems that are unlikely to go away as Vista comes out.
Vista-64 has the problem that you've got the uncertain future of a heavily DRMed machine. This may or may not prove to be a show-stopper, so I'd say wait and see..
It is a problem when people don't get a choice of OS to install on their system. Paying 30% of your system cost for an OS that you're not going to use is a rather onerous tax. If it wasn't for Microsoft twisting the arms of large distributors to prevent them from distributing machines with Linux (or at least without Windows), a lot more people might have realized just how useful a Linux box is these days.
gzip is portable to most 'modern' unides. Even many of those systems that don't have it as a default distribute the GNU tools as a separate (but free) add-on.
As an absolute worst case, you can always compile and install the GNU tools (in your home 'bin' directory, if necessary), including, possibly, gcc.
If you're really worried about portability, you should also remember that -C is also a 'relatively' recent add-on to tar, so you'd be better off with ' (cd a/b/c ; tar -xf - ) < somefile '
However, once you have gnu tar and gzip installed, you can then go 'tar -C a/b/c -xzf somefile.gz'
Xargs gets messy if you want the filenames to be in the middle. It's also quite a waste when you know that you're not going to get more than 10,000 values... eg:
grep / ` which someprog`
Then again, there's also the more recent replacement for the backquote -- the $( structure ).. Because it has a syntactically distinct start and end indicator, it's far easier to nest them (when the need arises).
First is the presumption that a computer (shipped) without an OS is useless... I can pop in a Knoppix disk and do most of the things that people use their computers for without installing any OS -- banking, messaging, skype, word processing, photo editing, etc., etc.,... His statement is false.
second is that that that Windows is the only OS that anybody would ever want.
third is the implicit claim of the (many) astro-turfers that this suit is meant to prevent HP from selling computers with MS-Windows.... From TFA:
UFC said it wants consumers to be able to choose the software for their machine and get reimbursed for purchasing an OS they did not want.
(emphasis mine).
Nothing wrong with consumers buying an HP computer with Windows, as long as that's what they want (which will be the case for many -- but not all -- consumers).
It's more like if every major hospital in the country forced children born there to be baptized as Roman Cathoic -- and required that the parents pay a tithe to the Roman Catholic Church for the 'privilege'.
Now, yes, you can turn around and have the child declared Baptist, Lutheran, Jewish or Muslim, etc., but you still won't get back the $75 that went to the RC church.... and, for some people, just having the taint of the RC church on their children is almost as bad as being declared pagan. -- and, for some people, explaining to your parents back home why their grandchild's Birth Certificate says Roman Catholic is going to be, uhm, delicate.
Of course you also have the option of having your child born at home, but some people really like the convenience and safety of a large hospital.
[I'm RC, myself, so I can (I hope) get away with this analogy.]
A computer without an OS can boot Knoppix, read emails, post to Slashdot, do my banking and write a business plan.
The statement of the HP rep is false.
Also false is the straw-man defense of the astro-turfers that this lawsuit is trying to prevent HP from selling Windows with their computers.
The lawsuit is just trying to force HP to admit that not all of their customers want Windows, and allowing to buy their computer -- either with their choice of OS (Windows or otherwise), or with no OS at all.
If consumers want Windows, they will have no problem getting it from HP. The difference is that people who want Linux (or BeOS, or BSD) won't have to pay for Windows on top of that.
No. The situation is that HP is obligated (by an unnamed force who'se initials are MS) to not sell the computer without MS-Windows.
The GP posting, however, is incorrect. It's more like mandating that all major CD-player manufacturers sell their players the complete works of Celene Dion. -- and you have to build your CD player from scratch to have it start up without "Because You Loved Me," playing the first time.
And then finding out that trying to sell your Celine Dion CDs on E-Bay gets you shut down by Sony Records accusing you of selling a pirate copy (because "nobody would want to listen to anything other than Celine").
You obviously haven't seen the articles about the troubles that people have had trying to buy a desktop PC from Dell, and other large PC manufacturers without MS-Windows installed. They won't allow you to buy your PC without Windows, but it's far easier to purchase it without memory, or a DVD player, or a monitor or.....
They're not necessarily asking to Mandate that HP sell machines without OS. Just that people not be forced to buy their HP-computer with MS-Windows.
The paper analogy doesn't really work because paper is a consumable, so once you finish off your box of (mandated) Weyerhauser paper, you can buy the rest of your supplies from Scott, or whomever.
This is especially a problem because, nowadays, MS-Windows is a significant part of the price of a low-end PC. This might be more like buying a $200 printer and finding that it comes with 3 cases of Weyerhauser virgin-forest salmon pink paper. This is fine for people who
don't prefer recycled paper,
don't mind printing on salmon pink
like the quality of Weyerhauser paper
actually expect to use 3 cases of paper in the life of the printer, and
don't mind paying for $100 of paper up front.
Part of the fallacy, as well, is the presumption that HP (and DELL, and Gateway) made the decision to mandate MS-Windows on (almost) all of their computers in the absence of any arm-twisting by MS. What this case is really meant to do is un-twist HP's arm so that all of the OS distributers left standing these days have a level playing field when it comes to selling their OS to prospective customers.
Most people don't care what brand of tire comes with their car, but if you ask for a particular kind of tire, most manufacturers will be more than happy to deliver your car with the brand of your choice.
One thing that I'll note here, that having been said, is that it's actually (slightly) problematic to ship a car from the manufacturer to the dealer without tires, since you have to do a little bit (
That's somewhat similar to the burn test for compuers, except that most computers probably do their burn test with a net-boot these days, and don't actually have to do a full OS install -- and even if they do, it's almost trivial to clean the disk after the test (Darin's Boot and Nuke comes to mind). Tires, on the other hand, are physical entities which take up space and require incremental resources to manufacture and to ship back to their source.
Once you have the infrastructure to load 7 different OS versions (which is, I think, what VISTA was split into, at last count), adding a few other OSes, or simply a disk clean is pretty trivial.
No. I just think that it shouldn't be Mandated (by Microsoft) that I should only be able to buy machines with MS-Windows from any majour Manufacturer... which, for me, is the same as having a useless computer, except for the fact that I'm paying a tax to Microsoft for the 'privilege' of deleting XP and installing the OS of my choice.
This lawsuit isn't just aimed at HP. Once HP is forced to sell their machines with a choice of Windows or not, all it will take is a whisper from my lawyer to get a similarly egalitarian treatment from Dell, Gateway and any of the other Tier 1 and Tier 2 computer manufacturers.
It's one thing to recommend MS-Windows as the OS of choice. It's something else, entirely, to mandate MS-Windows.
Do you honestly think it should be mandated that computers must come OS-free?
I just shouldn't be punished by HP for not wanting to use the OS that they want to hoist on me. That's what tying is, and it's illegal.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, they may have gone over it dozens or hundreds of times -- these people are often perfectionists. That's why the get the big bucks, but if some unexpected glitch causes Vista to spuriously trash the quality of your product on the final production run, 5 minutes before the courier has to get back to his truck, even catching the glitch might not be enough to save your ass.
And it doesn't have to happen always, either. One mangled video might be all it takes to trash the reputation of an up-and coming company. They'll never have the chance to figure out what hit them.
In theory, once the DRM is cracked, either Linux or Windows should be able to do whatever they want with it, but the DMCA says that you'll be looking over your shoulder a lot if you're intending to put the results of that crack out in public view.
DRM will mostly just prevent honest people from doing dishonest things -- unfortunately, those aren't the kind of people that you have to worry about most.
There 'always' have been, and probably ever will be professional pirates who will break DRM in ways that Microsoft's '(un)trustable computing' will never catch. I still remember the friend of mine who, in 1982 had a cracked copy of a 'heavily protected' game, 2 weeks before it was even released. ..... Yep. Yep. yep.
Oh yeah, DRM's gonna stop him, today
Unfortunately, there may also be situations in which a driver isn't able to prove that it's got clean media and will, therefore set a 'trouble bit' to indicate that it's 'worried'. This can cause the degradation of the affected media, whether it's properly DRMed or not.
Part of the problem is that secure DRM is going to essentially require that every step in the chain can prove that it's handling the data correctly. According to at least one document, issues of uncertainty are to be resolved by presuming the worst (that someone is attempting to game the system). Under such uncertain conditions, loss of quality is a serious possibility -- whether the data being processed really is protected or not.
A really bad case might be a compressed or encrypted backup data stream causing a media device to think that it's getting 'cracked' DRM media. The device 'degrades' the "media", resulting in the irreversible scrambling of your backup. Something like that may be rare, but it only has to happen once or twice to critical data for a company to get a really sour taste in their mouth.
That something wrong might be you trying to tamper with the DRM system, or it might just be because a capacitor someplace got too warm and went out of spec.
Possible worst-case scenarios are: your business partner sends you a video clip in the email, not knowing that it's DRMed. You open the email while waiting for the final render of your $.5M video clip, and the presence of the 'unauthorized media' causes Vista to degrade the quality of the render for 30 seconds. If you're lucky and catch the problem, your QC people may spend hours unsuccessfully trying to track down the source of the problem.
More ominously, the installation of a new piece of equipment next door (say, an X-Ray machine) might cause a finicky board to sporadically set the 'trouble bit' and cause degradation whenever the new equipment is running. It could take you months to figure out why supposedly perfect renders go south at random times. .... and everybody involved in the creation of the errant drivers or hardware will point to the EULA that tells you to expect these things to happen from time to time.
Part of the problem is that when, where and why Vista will degrade your media in transit isn't (and can't be) properly documented. It depends among other things, on security by obscurity. If people understood precisely how the system worked, they might be able to circumvent it ... so if your income depends on the quality of your media not being degraded, you're going to be holding your breath the entire time that you're using Vista. You might get away unscathed, or you might not.
If it only 'rarely' degrades your 'unprotected' media (say 1% of the time) that means that, in a 90 minute video you're going to find 1 minute of degraded video times the number of times that you duplicate or edit your product while using it. -- and if you don't notice that a critical part of your video got squashed in the final downmix before you rushed your (hopefully) award-winning project into the hands of the waiting courier, you're gonna be soooooo unhappy 3 days down the road when you finally recover from the rush and figure out what happened.
That's the worry that Vista's "trusted computing" will create for high-end content producers.
Long Live Dr. Suse
(Er, Sue Us,
er, Suuueeeeee!,
oh, whatever!
Somebody in your school's IT group needs a cluebat.
That's the nice thing about Open Source and Free software -- It doesn't cost you anything to do a quick test, (and you always have th choice of fixing any deal-busters on your own dime).
It may be, for example, that 75% of the office could move to Linux and Open Office today, while the other 25% might have to either stay with Windows in the interim or use VNC or Cygwin on Linux with a longer delay while a more permanent solution is worked on.
If, on the other hand, 90% of the company uses the critical applications, they are designed in such a way that running them on an emulator or network isn't feasible and there's no Linux equivalent, then you've got a slam dunk for staying with Windows.
As with any situation where you're depending on a 2 paragraph description of a complex situation, there's a lot of detail missing that would likely make a critical difference.
From: Donald Rumsfield
To: General Whosit
Subject: My final Orders
This email contains a computer trogan.
You are so pwned!!!
Sincerely
Osama Bin Ladin.
____
Yeah... Typos are on purpose
Have you tried stripping it?
Micorosoft has also done a really good job of hiding from people the fact that FLOSS is even a real and legitimate choice for many users.
There's no fear in the end user because almost nobody actually reads the EULA to figure out what MS says they're agreeing to, and even fewer can understand the EULA in any event.
XP-64 seems to have all sorts of driver problems that are unlikely to go away as Vista comes out.
Vista-64 has the problem that you've got the uncertain future of a heavily DRMed machine. This may or may not prove to be a show-stopper, so I'd say wait and see..
It is a problem when people don't get a choice of OS to install on their system. Paying 30% of your system cost for an OS that you're not going to use is a rather onerous tax. If it wasn't for Microsoft twisting the arms of large distributors to prevent them from distributing machines with Linux (or at least without Windows), a lot more people might have realized just how useful a Linux box is these days.
As an absolute worst case, you can always compile and install the GNU tools (in your home 'bin' directory, if necessary), including, possibly, gcc.
If you're really worried about portability, you should also remember that -C is also a 'relatively' recent add-on to tar, so you'd be better off with ' (cd a/b/c ; tar -xf - ) < somefile '
However, once you have gnu tar and gzip installed, you can then go 'tar -C a/b/c -xzf somefile.gz'
-
First is the presumption that a computer (shipped) without an OS is useless... I can pop in a Knoppix disk and do most of the things that people use their computers for without installing any OS -- banking, messaging, skype, word processing, photo editing, etc., etc.,
... His statement is false.
- second is that that that Windows is the only OS that anybody would ever want.
- third is the implicit claim of the (many) astro-turfers that this suit is meant to prevent HP from selling computers with MS-Windows.... From TFA:
Nothing wrong with consumers buying an HP computer with Windows, as long as that's what they want (which will be the case for many -- but not all -- consumers).
It's more like if every major hospital in the country forced children born there to be baptized as Roman Cathoic -- and required that the parents pay a tithe to the Roman Catholic Church for the 'privilege'.Now, yes, you can turn around and have the child declared Baptist, Lutheran, Jewish or Muslim, etc., but you still won't get back the $75 that went to the RC church.... and, for some people, just having the taint of the RC church on their children is almost as bad as being declared pagan. -- and, for some people, explaining to your parents back home why their grandchild's Birth Certificate says Roman Catholic is going to be, uhm, delicate.
Of course you also have the option of having your child born at home, but some people really like the convenience and safety of a large hospital.
[I'm RC, myself, so I can (I hope) get away with this analogy.]
The statement of the HP rep is false.
Also false is the straw-man defense of the astro-turfers that this lawsuit is trying to prevent HP from selling Windows with their computers.
The lawsuit is just trying to force HP to admit that not all of their customers want Windows, and allowing to buy their computer -- either with their choice of OS (Windows or otherwise), or with no OS at all.
If consumers want Windows, they will have no problem getting it from HP. The difference is that people who want Linux (or BeOS, or BSD) won't have to pay for Windows on top of that.
The GP posting, however, is incorrect. It's more like mandating that all major CD-player manufacturers sell their players the complete works of Celene Dion. -- and you have to build your CD player from scratch to have it start up without "Because You Loved Me," playing the first time.
And then finding out that trying to sell your Celine Dion CDs on E-Bay gets you shut down by Sony Records accusing you of selling a pirate copy (because "nobody would want to listen to anything other than Celine").
You obviously haven't seen the articles about the troubles that people have had trying to buy a desktop PC from Dell, and other large PC manufacturers without MS-Windows installed. They won't allow you to buy your PC without Windows, but it's far easier to purchase it without memory, or a DVD player, or a monitor or .....
The paper analogy doesn't really work because paper is a consumable, so once you finish off your box of (mandated) Weyerhauser paper, you can buy the rest of your supplies from Scott, or whomever.
This is especially a problem because, nowadays, MS-Windows is a significant part of the price of a low-end PC. This might be more like buying a $200 printer and finding that it comes with 3 cases of Weyerhauser virgin-forest salmon pink paper. This is fine for people who
- don't prefer recycled paper,
- don't mind printing on salmon pink
- like the quality of Weyerhauser paper
- actually expect to use 3 cases of paper in the life of the printer, and
- don't mind paying for $100 of paper up front.
Part of the fallacy, as well, is the presumption that HP (and DELL, and Gateway) made the decision to mandate MS-Windows on (almost) all of their computers in the absence of any arm-twisting by MS. What this case is really meant to do is un-twist HP's arm so that all of the OS distributers left standing these days have a level playing field when it comes to selling their OS to prospective customers.One thing that I'll note here, that having been said, is that it's actually (slightly) problematic to ship a car from the manufacturer to the dealer without tires, since you have to do a little bit ( That's somewhat similar to the burn test for compuers, except that most computers probably do their burn test with a net-boot these days, and don't actually have to do a full OS install -- and even if they do, it's almost trivial to clean the disk after the test (Darin's Boot and Nuke comes to mind). Tires, on the other hand, are physical entities which take up space and require incremental resources to manufacture and to ship back to their source.
Once you have the infrastructure to load 7 different OS versions (which is, I think, what VISTA was split into, at last count), adding a few other OSes, or simply a disk clean is pretty trivial.
This lawsuit isn't just aimed at HP. Once HP is forced to sell their machines with a choice of Windows or not, all it will take is a whisper from my lawyer to get a similarly egalitarian treatment from Dell, Gateway and any of the other Tier 1 and Tier 2 computer manufacturers.
It's one thing to recommend MS-Windows as the OS of choice. It's something else, entirely, to mandate MS-Windows.
I just shouldn't be punished by HP for not wanting to use the OS that they want to hoist on me. That's what tying is, and it's illegal.