after the fact, the DRM issues have proven to mostly be true. Some minor ones have been fixed with patches but the vast majority have not and internally it has been partially blamed for the lack of uptake in Vista.
Did you miss the point about the Gutmann article being updated with 14,000 words in the months following "VISTA's GENERAL RELEASE TO OEM's and the public" and also the ZDNet articles being written in September 2007? Or are you being intentionally obtuse?
What DRM issues are you talking about? Did you even read the articles? And where did you learn that "internally it has been partially blamed for the lack of uptake in Vista" ? Care to cite ANY references, experiences, even anecdotes instead of just saying it is so?
September what? The ZDNet article was written in September 2007, a full 10 months after Vista RTM in November 2006. The Gutmann article was first published in December, a month after RTM and added 14,000 words after that and was last updated in June(6 months after RTM). Cognitive dissonance?
You'll note that Ed spends most of his time attacking irrelevent mistakes in details, and uses this as basis to claim the whole point is invalid. Gutmann's main point was that the DRM in Vista stops you for viewing or degrades legitimate content like home videos taken from HD camcorders. Ed proved that all of that is a crock of BS and FUD. Gutmann even claimed that it would affect medical images and videos and people started blindly believing it. MS itself had to step up because the FUD was going out of control in the media which was blindly parroting Gutmann's claims without research, and debunk it.
From the wiki:
In the United States, the Federal Communications Commission approved HDCP as a "Digital Output Protection Technology" on August 4, 2004, despite its known flaws.[8] The FCC's Broadcast flag regulations, which were struck down by the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, would have required DRM technologies on all digital outputs from HDTV signal demodulators. Congress is still considering legislation that would implement something similar to the Broadcast Flag. The HDCP standard is more restrictive than the FCC's Digital Output Protection Technology requirement. HDCP bans compliant products from converting HDCP-restricted content to full-resolution analog form, presumably in an attempt to reduce the size of the analog hole.
On January 19, 2005, the European Industry Association for Information Systems (EICTA) announced that HDCP is a required component of the European "HD ready" label.[9]
Microsoft's new operating system, Windows Vista, utilizes this technology in the context of computer graphics cards and monitors. So you want Vista to ignore the standard and just start playing HDCP labeled content(when it comes out in a few years) in full HD on Vista on non-HDCP compliant displays? The movie studios will hit MS with a multibillion dollar DMCA lawsuit before you can say 'M$' and the judge would rule accordingly. Sorry, your anger at HDCP is directed at the wrong place. And if MS refuses to implement HDCP at all, the movie studios can tell MS to sod off, because only a miniscule number of people would want to watch HD content on laptops and computers, as opposed to big screen TVs with Bluray players. MS would have a lot to lose and Apple(a member of the BluRay association), would probably step in and implement HDCP and be the only OS for legal HD playback.
I was mostly referring to the part where he links to an Austrailian vendor for proof and then provides a picture of a suggested use, with an improbably placed airport terminal monitor easily a hundred feet in the air and amazingly all in focus despite the oblique angle. That's from Samsung's advertizing material. Looks like a obvious mockup showing the intended use of the monitor. Not a computer monitor for sure like Gutmann claimed, faked ad pic or not.
Obviously a guy claiming that Vista DRM is causing global warming or that HD playback is impossible is over the top. If you read the highly modded up FUD on here, you'd actually start believing that.
I think I'll just continue to use Ubuntu where I don't have to worry about this or that. You win, and I guess your prize is you can keep using Vista. Enjoy. I dual boot Vista x64/Ubuntu on my desktop. Used to run gentoo(after endless hours of compilation) back when I was a student and had a lot of time. Should try that on the quadcore sometime, should compile faster. Anyway, it just hurts me to see otherwise rational and smart people fall victim to groupthink and FUD.
I haven't really paid much attention to Vista DRM one way or another. But even an objective observer would at least actually try the things he Gutmann says can't be done. Rather than spend the money and try, the author cites a sales website, and a clearly photoshopped "example use" on the second page. Of course salesmen are going to say everything's possible. As the recent Vista-capable suit shows, you can't rely on such claims to be accurate.
Are we even reading the same fucking articles???! I am tired of having to go back through the articles to cite them for you.
FTA:
No one has been able to identify a Windows system that will play HD content in HD quality? Countless reviews of PC hardware over the past year say otherwise. In November 2006, PC Magazine praised the Toshiba Qosmio for its exquisite playback of HD DVD discs at 1080p using an Nvidia GeForce Go 7600. (PC Pro UK offers similar praise of the fantastic 1920×1200 [1080p] picture in a more recent review of the this years Qosmio, equipped with Windows Vista Ultimate.) This CNET review published in February 2007 described outstanding Blu-ray video quality at 1080p on a Velocity Micro PC running Vista Home Premium. Laptop Magazines July review of a high-end Sony Vaio (also equipped with an Nvidia Go 7600 GPU) praises its 1080p eye candy, which the reviewers watched on a 32-inch TV over an HDMI connection. Ive been watching Blu-ray and HD DVD discs at 1080i resolution (maximum available on my set) on a Dell XPS 410 that I purchased last December. With the right hardware, you can get world-class HD performance out of a computer running Windows Vista.
Most of the reviews(NOT from the salesmen) are linked so you can check them out if you really want to. Please read the article(s) before you comment again. Or I'll have to suppose that you're just a karmawhoring troll.
People have noticed stuttering on playback, due to scheduling priorities between network and realtime playback on Vista. That was a bug in Vista that was fixed in SP1.
Who do i trust, an independent researcher or an M$ lackey? FTA:
In Part 1 of this three-part series, I discussed some of the technical errors in Gutmanns paper that illustrate his lack of hands-on experience with the technology hes trying to cover and his fundamental confusion over how Windows Vista content protection features work. (Youll find more examples in Part 3.) If you think Im nitpicking over these details, you miss the point completely. Gutmann is an academic researcher, and the way scientists have worked since the end of the Dark Ages has been with a rigorous set of principles: You start with a thesis, you design experiments that test that thesis, and using those experimental results as well as those of your peers, you assemble evidence that proves or disproves your thesis. Then you publish.
As I noted last month, Gutmann has completely skipped the experimental portion of this time-tested process. He has literally no firsthand evidence to support most of the outrageous claims he makes, and much of the secondhand anecdotal evidence he has assembled is either taken out of context or is of questionable relevance. As I show later in this post, some of his evidence is just plain made up. When someone who claims to be a scientist publishes a paper filled with provably wrong facts, that persons competence is called into question. When all of those errors are in one direction, that persons honesty, objectivity, and devotion to the truth are called into question as well. The point is, why do you have to trust someone? Just look up the references if you have any doubt to see if they match up or not. Alternatively, you can close your eyes and ears and chant 'la la la M$ M$ M$' while Vista plays HD content right before your very eyes. Gutmann has not even used Vista before writing a 26,0000 word diatribe. Also, if Ed Bott has a financial incentive for his spin, Gutmann has a popularity incentive. His article has become wildly popular and linked all over the internet. I am sure that counts as a incentive for his FUD mongering.
That's actually an old article filled with half truths that only show one particular point of view of the DRM on Vista. It was released shortly after beta and now that Vista has been on the market for months, it has actually shown that 75% of the DRM problems were actually true (while the rest were exaggerations). Did you even read the articles?
The very first paragraph.
New Zealand researcher who wrote a paper last December that made a series of outrageous and inflammatory claims about Windows Vista. Since then, Gutmann has expanded the paper to more than four times its original size. The current version available on Gutmanns website clocks in at more than 26,000 words, making it longer than some recent works of fiction. The end of the first part:
Gutmann has added nearly 14,000 words to his report since writing the original paper but strangely hasnt updated this part. So, the article wasn't based on a 'beta' version of Vista like you claim it did. Also, Vista went RTM in Nov 2006 and the article was orginally published in December of that year.
You don't read the articles you reply to, and arbitrarily claim without any proof, reference, link or anything that 75% of the claimed DRM troubles were true. Hello? Gutmann? Is that you?:)
What's significant here is that Windows has lost it's graphics crown. DRM and bloat or industry defection for the same reasons, we all know the root cause. Free software is simply cleaner and works better. If the ability to run DirectX 9 under Wine was not enough to move gamers to Linux, this is. Things can only go downhill for Microsoft now. Free drivers will be even cleaner and the performance gap will widen. From TFA:
Then in September, we had looked at NVIDIA's multi-GPU performance under Linux and Windows when running two GeForce 8600GT 256MB graphics cards in SLI (Scalable Link Interface). Windows XP and the ForceWare driver had outpaced Linux in every gaming test we conducted. The drivers have a lot more influence than you give it credit for.
Not only that, the benchmark runs on OpenGL and not DirectX. A DirectX might be significantly faster on Windows. Reason being that Nvidia optimizes drivers for DirectX for windows and OpenGL for other platforms, because of usage patterns to get the best ROI.
I can't see how anybody who saw the demo of the SDK can say this. There's a whole new platform available. You can program an app to run on a fully-powerful platform, and game developers are going to go nuts. Did you see Spore? That space shoot-'em-up? The Sega game? Holy crap! It's like the Wii Remote.
So you mean the original Macintosh wasn't way more cooler than the competition? Apple lost that particular round because they locked up the hardware leading no competition between OEMs, which drove down the prices on the PC side. Something similar could happen this time too.
If you are a freeware developer, you pay NOTHING. If you want to charge for your software, you control the pricing, and Apple takes 30%, with which they pay for a huge server farm, credit-card charges, bandwidth, marketing -- you're in the most popular e-store already, and you'll be listed prominently, and if your app gets Apple publicity, that's better than most could ever afford. Does Apple make money on its 99c tracks? A penny or two, is the most common response. They will take a cut on software, but so do theatrical agents, and a good one is worth his weight in gold, because they keep your money flow going. In fact, software developers now have roughly the same terms as the record labels. Not bad, I say.
All of what you say sounds good IF selling through iTunes was a choice given to the developer. But no, Apple has to be a control freak and police each program as to what it can and can't do, all while take a hefty cut. And you compare them to the record labels as if it's a good thing? Just read through comments on the RIAA stories on here about how the techies hate such arrangements(and rightly so). Once Apple does it, it's all okay, eh?
Value to the consumer to being able to buy an app from the iPhone, and to be pretty sure someone has gone through it enough that there's no virus or malware or incompetence there? Priceless.
Then why not let the consumers sort it out? Imagine MS setting up a one stop download shop and making Windows apps run ONLY through it. Imagine them taking 30% of the revenues(before expenses, advertizing costs and taxes) of Adobe, EA, AutoCAD, TurboTax and the zillion other PC developers. Imagine a computing world without Dell, HP, Compaq, Asus, Sony etc. Doesn't sound so good now does it? Would Windows software have taken off like it did if this was the case? Once Apple does it, it's all okay?
Portable MP3 players have never been marketed and used as computing devices. Remember the excellent Macintoshes in the 80s? How were Microsoft, HP, Dell, IBM, Compaq etc.
Compared to the iPod, don't you think there's a difference this time around?
I got the gist of your whole message and countered it by saying that if IE8 beta also has such a buzz, it means that there's a lot of bored techies at work checking out new tech stuff coming out rather than being a concrete indicator of being any 'success'. Also, when I tried reaching developer.apple.com after seeing your post, it worked fine for me(in Opera).
Yea. Apple takes care of notifying users of updates. Apple takes care of bandwidth and server costs. You mean like the Debian/Gentoo/Fedora do for their repositories of software?
For that 30% you get a distribution network, a way to notify your users of updates, and free advertising via the integrated download client. Seems pretty fair to me. I can see it being fair if it's optional(like.Mac), but if you don't need all those features, why do you have to give up 30% ? If.Mac was made compulsory with every Apple machine would you say, 'It's pretty fair to be forced that way, because you get x GB of storage, email, etc. etc. '
It's fair if the consumer(in this case the developer) gets to decide if it's worth it to them or not on their terms.
IIRC Palm charges charges similarly, and you have to buy the IDE. (I don't know about RIM.)
I thought the iPhone was hailed as being different and breaking the status quo? Instead we are getting the same stuff peddled to us as the other manufacturers?
Note to grandparent, Windows Mobile has none of these nonsense restrictions. So there's no MS-like control here, unless you count the XBoxes. Consolization of what is essentially a handheld version of computer is going to wreck havoc on the hardware and software ecosystem.
a) The hardware - some pretty sweet margins
b) A nice cut (~15 to 25%) on the montly fees
3) A 30% cut on all software sold (except of course the free apps)
Contrast this to a Windows mobile phone. Microsoft gets paid a fixed license amount on each device sold and makes nothing on the hardware, the monthly fee, and any software sold to run on their OS. This helps companies compete on hardware, apps etc. I think Apple is gonna miss out on small companies(where the most innovation lies) which cannot afford the 30% overhead for their software sales. Also Apple being the gatekeeper of the software will hurt apps(even free ones) that try to fundamentally interact with the hardware in a non-approved Apple way. The iPhone is aimed at the casual consumers, most of whom don't read long forum threads dedicated to jailbreaking it.
As of now, this looks like a rerun of the 80s microcomputer war and we all know how that turned out to be. It's all about 'Developers, Developers and Developers'. Microsoft gets that and ships excellent development tools with no restrictions at all. Right now, Windows Mobile phones may suck, but heavy competition between handset manufacturers is going to make them better and Windows Mobile OS(look at 6.1 and upcoming 7.0) is heading towards being 'good enough'(like DOS and Windows 3.11). Already we see devices like the Sony Xperia (video ad) coming out which will give Apple a run for their money. Remember what IBM, Dell, Gateway, HP, Compaq did to Apple back in the 80s? Will Sony, Samsung, Nokia be their equivalent in this round?
I think Apple is missing the bandwagon again in their spirit to make money immediately and are killing the gold egg laying goose for their short term benefit.
I run Vista x64(yea burn down my karma for it, it works well for me and I like it more than XP) at home and was wondering what the most secure browser for me would be while still having flash and javascript etc. on. The main contenders are IE7, Firefox and Opera. Opera is my current browser because Firefox was a dog on my old 256MB laptop(my current machine has 8 gigs). Opera has a low chance of exploits in the wild because of the low number of users. IE7 on Vista has a sandbox so that a big buffer overrun exploit that gets past the DEP protection would still be sandboxed from damaging my user documents unless I give it express permission. Firefox doesn't have such protection and is mainstream enough to have exploits in the wild for it. Since IE7 is kind of clunky to use, am I better off with Opera?
Crash Recovery... aka Session Restore in Firefox Sorry to nitpick, but Opera had that feature atleast back from 2000 or 2001 if not implemented earlier in other browsers. While correcting a misattribution of a 'new' feature to IE, you yourself are misattributing it to FireFox.
Does EA need to develop a version of online Scrabble? What are they going to do, make a Directx 10 only version of it with Ageia physics so that it runs only on Vista with a hardware physics card? For a pro-flash developer I think it will take only a weekend of work to make a beta version of a clone of scrabble.
I've to call you out on that one. Do you have any proof like screenshots or reproducible steps to duplicate this behavior? Or were you just karma whoring?
Uhh? How many people watch bluray movies on PCs? 0.0001% of the number of people who watch it on the PS3? Heck, how many watch DVDs on PCs? 0.01% of the number of those that watch them on standalone players? The media companies would say fuck you to MS while they keep the DRM and Sony and other electronic companies would thank MS for increasing the sales of the PS3 and standalone players.
although you can use the Vista CD to repair those errors, unless you paid for the downloadable version which doesn't come on a CD, Wrong, you can boot into safe mode and do a restore just like you can do with the Vista "CD".
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Did you miss the point about the Gutmann article being updated with 14,000 words in the months following "VISTA's GENERAL RELEASE TO OEM's and the public" and also the ZDNet articles being written in September 2007? Or are you being intentionally obtuse?
What DRM issues are you talking about? Did you even read the articles? And where did you learn that "internally it has been partially blamed for the lack of uptake in Vista" ? Care to cite ANY references, experiences, even anecdotes instead of just saying it is so?September what? The ZDNet article was written in September 2007, a full 10 months after Vista RTM in November 2006. The Gutmann article was first published in December, a month after RTM and added 14,000 words after that and was last updated in June(6 months after RTM). Cognitive dissonance?
Are we even reading the same fucking articles???! I am tired of having to go back through the articles to cite them for you.
FTA: No one has been able to identify a Windows system that will play HD content in HD quality? Countless reviews of PC hardware over the past year say otherwise. In November 2006, PC Magazine praised the Toshiba Qosmio for its exquisite playback of HD DVD discs at 1080p using an Nvidia GeForce Go 7600. (PC Pro UK offers similar praise of the fantastic 1920×1200 [1080p] picture in a more recent review of the this years Qosmio, equipped with Windows Vista Ultimate.) This CNET review published in February 2007 described outstanding Blu-ray video quality at 1080p on a Velocity Micro PC running Vista Home Premium. Laptop Magazines July review of a high-end Sony Vaio (also equipped with an Nvidia Go 7600 GPU) praises its 1080p eye candy, which the reviewers watched on a 32-inch TV over an HDMI connection. Ive been watching Blu-ray and HD DVD discs at 1080i resolution (maximum available on my set) on a Dell XPS 410 that I purchased last December. With the right hardware, you can get world-class HD performance out of a computer running Windows Vista.Most of the reviews(NOT from the salesmen) are linked so you can check them out if you really want to. Please read the article(s) before you comment again. Or I'll have to suppose that you're just a karmawhoring troll.
People have noticed stuttering on playback, due to scheduling priorities between network and realtime playback on Vista. That was a bug in Vista that was fixed in SP1.Not only that, the benchmark runs on OpenGL and not DirectX. A DirectX might be significantly faster on Windows. Reason being that Nvidia optimizes drivers for DirectX for windows and OpenGL for other platforms, because of usage patterns to get the best ROI.
It's mostly FUD. See here (read all three parts)
So you mean the original Macintosh wasn't way more cooler than the competition? Apple lost that particular round because they locked up the hardware leading no competition between OEMs, which drove down the prices on the PC side. Something similar could happen this time too.
If you are a freeware developer, you pay NOTHING. If you want to charge for your software, you control the pricing, and Apple takes 30%, with which they pay for a huge server farm, credit-card charges, bandwidth, marketing -- you're in the most popular e-store already, and you'll be listed prominently, and if your app gets Apple publicity, that's better than most could ever afford. Does Apple make money on its 99c tracks? A penny or two, is the most common response. They will take a cut on software, but so do theatrical agents, and a good one is worth his weight in gold, because they keep your money flow going. In fact, software developers now have roughly the same terms as the record labels. Not bad, I say.All of what you say sounds good IF selling through iTunes was a choice given to the developer. But no, Apple has to be a control freak and police each program as to what it can and can't do, all while take a hefty cut. And you compare them to the record labels as if it's a good thing? Just read through comments on the RIAA stories on here about how the techies hate such arrangements(and rightly so). Once Apple does it, it's all okay, eh?
Value to the consumer to being able to buy an app from the iPhone, and to be pretty sure someone has gone through it enough that there's no virus or malware or incompetence there? Priceless.Then why not let the consumers sort it out? Imagine MS setting up a one stop download shop and making Windows apps run ONLY through it. Imagine them taking 30% of the revenues(before expenses, advertizing costs and taxes) of Adobe, EA, AutoCAD, TurboTax and the zillion other PC developers. Imagine a computing world without Dell, HP, Compaq, Asus, Sony etc. Doesn't sound so good now does it? Would Windows software have taken off like it did if this was the case? Once Apple does it, it's all okay?
Compared to the iPod, don't you think there's a difference this time around?
I got the gist of your whole message and countered it by saying that if IE8 beta also has such a buzz, it means that there's a lot of bored techies at work checking out new tech stuff coming out rather than being a concrete indicator of being any 'success'. Also, when I tried reaching developer.apple.com after seeing your post, it worked fine for me(in Opera).
And yesterday Microsoft's download servers went down because of the IE8 beta release. What's your point again?
It's fair if the consumer(in this case the developer) gets to decide if it's worth it to them or not on their terms.
IIRC Palm charges charges similarly, and you have to buy the IDE. (I don't know about RIM.)
I thought the iPhone was hailed as being different and breaking the status quo? Instead we are getting the same stuff peddled to us as the other manufacturers?
Note to grandparent, Windows Mobile has none of these nonsense restrictions. So there's no MS-like control here, unless you count the XBoxes. Consolization of what is essentially a handheld version of computer is going to wreck havoc on the hardware and software ecosystem.
a) The hardware - some pretty sweet margins b) A nice cut (~15 to 25%) on the montly fees 3) A 30% cut on all software sold (except of course the free apps)
Contrast this to a Windows mobile phone. Microsoft gets paid a fixed license amount on each device sold and makes nothing on the hardware, the monthly fee, and any software sold to run on their OS. This helps companies compete on hardware, apps etc. I think Apple is gonna miss out on small companies(where the most innovation lies) which cannot afford the 30% overhead for their software sales. Also Apple being the gatekeeper of the software will hurt apps(even free ones) that try to fundamentally interact with the hardware in a non-approved Apple way. The iPhone is aimed at the casual consumers, most of whom don't read long forum threads dedicated to jailbreaking it.
As of now, this looks like a rerun of the 80s microcomputer war and we all know how that turned out to be. It's all about 'Developers, Developers and Developers'. Microsoft gets that and ships excellent development tools with no restrictions at all. Right now, Windows Mobile phones may suck, but heavy competition between handset manufacturers is going to make them better and Windows Mobile OS(look at 6.1 and upcoming 7.0) is heading towards being 'good enough'(like DOS and Windows 3.11). Already we see devices like the Sony Xperia (video ad) coming out which will give Apple a run for their money. Remember what IBM, Dell, Gateway, HP, Compaq did to Apple back in the 80s? Will Sony, Samsung, Nokia be their equivalent in this round?
I think Apple is missing the bandwagon again in their spirit to make money immediately and are killing the gold egg laying goose for their short term benefit.I run Vista x64(yea burn down my karma for it, it works well for me and I like it more than XP) at home and was wondering what the most secure browser for me would be while still having flash and javascript etc. on. The main contenders are IE7, Firefox and Opera. Opera is my current browser because Firefox was a dog on my old 256MB laptop(my current machine has 8 gigs). Opera has a low chance of exploits in the wild because of the low number of users. IE7 on Vista has a sandbox so that a big buffer overrun exploit that gets past the DEP protection would still be sandboxed from damaging my user documents unless I give it express permission. Firefox doesn't have such protection and is mainstream enough to have exploits in the wild for it. Since IE7 is kind of clunky to use, am I better off with Opera?
Does EA need to develop a version of online Scrabble? What are they going to do, make a Directx 10 only version of it with Ageia physics so that it runs only on Vista with a hardware physics card? For a pro-flash developer I think it will take only a weekend of work to make a beta version of a clone of scrabble.
I've to call you out on that one. Do you have any proof like screenshots or reproducible steps to duplicate this behavior? Or were you just karma whoring?
Uhh? How many people watch bluray movies on PCs? 0.0001% of the number of people who watch it on the PS3? Heck, how many watch DVDs on PCs? 0.01% of the number of those that watch them on standalone players? The media companies would say fuck you to MS while they keep the DRM and Sony and other electronic companies would thank MS for increasing the sales of the PS3 and standalone players.
You would buy something that would require lifting 50lb 2 meters every one minute to power a dim lamp?
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Google_acquisitions http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_acquired_by_Microsoft_Corporation#2007