Re:Poor Little Microsoft
on
AMD's New DRM
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· Score: 1
I don't know... its not like MS couldn't have just said no to the DRM. So HD-DVDs and Blue-Ray disks wont play on windows its not like everyone is going to go out and get a mac just to play those disks.
All that would have done is close of the PC to HD content, DRM for HD and BluRay was a done deal. What they did was implement DRM and consumers the choice of whether they want to buy DRM media or not. If you don't like DRM, don't buy content protected by it and you'll never know that DRM safeguards are in the OS.
Re:Poor Little Microsoft
on
AMD's New DRM
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· Score: 1
Microsoft had nearly $50 billion in revenue last year. This compares favorably with the entire domestic motion picture industry. If they don't want to do something, they have enormous bargaining power. More likely is that they are complicit, or actively engaged in DRM advocacy. To pretend they don't have a dog in the fight is naive.
If MS had tried to force the studios abandon DRM because of their control of the market, the MPAA would have gone to court in a heartbeat with anti-trust complaints. Which, given the anti-trust climate against MS at the time, they would have one.
I've heard lots of folks claim that DRM is some sort of MS sponsored conspiracy, but I've yet to see a rational explanation for why DRM is in MS interest since they are not a content creator, at most they are distributor of content. So please explain why MS would want strong DRM, what's the benefit to them. On the other hand the idea that MS took the path of least resistance and didn't fight DRM inflicted on the world by the MPAA is much easier to understand. Given the rather nebulous conspiracy theories vs. "the path of least resistance" I'm inclined to accept the Occam's Razor principle.
Re:Poor Little Microsoft
on
AMD's New DRM
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· Score: 2, Insightful
"Things like the BluRay consortium". That would inlcude the HD-DVD group right? Only, Microsoft are members of that consortium. So maybe it's ok to be mad in that case. It's not like this feature is going to be BluRay only, after all.
But both the BluRay and HD-DVD consortiums had to include DRM otherwise the studios had made it very clear that they would not produce HD content on those standards. So again, blaming Microsoft is missing the target, the real villains are the MPAA and the studios. I don't think MS is blamesless by any means when it comes to DRM, as you rightly point out their music-DRM efforts have been a fiasco of their own making. But just blaming MS for everything that's wrong with DRM is just plain wrong.
Re:Vista: the cowtow starts now
on
AMD's New DRM
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Implementing DRM functions in the CPU is not cowtowing to Vista, it's responding to the same rights management pressures that VISTA had to accommodate. VISTA's DRM is there to satisfy the demands of the content providers so that Vista can play back DRMed media from those providers. I know you want to blame MS for all the ills of the World, but you'd do better directing your misplaced anger at things like the BluRay consortium which make the DRM demands that Vista meets.
"I'm not having problems; therefore, nobody else could be having any, either."
ROTFLMAO, here we are discussing one person's unfavorable view of using Vista for 30 days because he found it unstable, and you yell at one other person who says he doesn't see the problem, isn't his view as valid as the reviewer in the article?
I must say I was surprised about the stability complaint. I've been running Vista throughout the beta program which certainly had some issues, but only to be expected with a beta. I loaded the RTM build at the end of November and since then I can honestly say that I've not had a single stability problem with the OS, no blue screens, no hangs and certainly no data loss. I'm currently running Vista on two home built machines:
My desktop which I use every day, all day ( I work from home)
2.8GHz Pentium D
2GB
ATI x700 PCI-Express graphics
total of 450GB usable of SATA RAID
My test bench
3GHz Dual Core Pentium D
4GB
Onboard ATI 1250 Express
total of 600GB of RAID 0+1
Both systems are using standard memory timings, I'm no tweaker and are on UPS, the only time they get rebooted is when MS issues a patch that requires a reboot (like the ANI patch last night)
I would go read the article in question, unfortunately it's been slashdotted:-)
Generally, though, I'd say that a lot of people would prefer a general purpose Anti-DRM key to punctual cures.
Only if it's really simple to do, i.e. run setup.exe and you're done. Anything involves installing root kits and god alone knows what else will be way beyond the technical ability of the average user. They'll be quite happy to download content that has the DRM stripped out, but I doubt that many would go to these lengths to get past DRM.
PS. don't get me wrong, I think DRM is a fundamentally bad idea and one that is doomed to failure, I just don't this as being the answer.
Can we agree on "handle DRM-protected media like unprotected content" instead of "play their cracked games and view their ripped movies"?
That would be more technically accurate. Whether it's something the average VISTA user is going to give a damn about is another question. My bet is that the DRM schemes will be cracked for HD-DVD and BluRay and non-DRM ripped copies will be available so I doubt most people will care.
They just wanna play their cracked games and view their ripped movies. And (bless the internet), they will learn about this hack and that it can be used to do just that.
Installing a rootkit and futzing around with the internals Vista just so that they can "play their cracked games and view their ripped movies" seems like an awful lot of trouble to go to ! Especially since there is *NOTHING* in Vista that prevents you playing your ripped movies or cracked games in the first place. For f***s sake how many times do people need this explaining to them, the DRM in Vista is about honoring DRM already attached to a piece of media. If the media has not DRM attached to it (like for example a ripped DVD or a BitTorrent download of a TV show) then Vista doesn't magically add DRM to it, it plays it back at whatever resolution it was recorded at. So DRM in Vista only gets you if buy content with with DRM attached to it, so it's your choice if you want to watch HD-DVD on your Vista then you have to respect the restrictions placed on that media by the owner of the content (not Microsoft.) All MS is doing is giving people the possibility of playing DRM media, they are not taking away any rights to play non-DRM media.
There is another aspect that the lawsuit is most likely going to cover and that is the crippling DRM built into the system. You have people buying supposed HD-ready machines with HD-DVD players and a nice big screen HD Screen and they plug it all up, put in a HD-DVD and...lookie..nothing. If I were to buy a big "Vista Ready" system that one of its main features is to play HD content, and then I find that Vista won't allow it, I would sue too.
What on earth are you blathering about? If you buy a PC that can play HD content, then by definition it's got things like HDCP HDMI and you have a monitor or TV that also understand HDCP/HDMI, both of which are required for full resolution playing of HD & BluRay DVD, then Vista will let you. If you don't have that set of hardware then there is nothing that Vista can do about it unless you want Microsoft to deliberately ignore the copy protection standards required by the content providers. Rant and rave all you like about the DRM applied to HD-DVD and BluRay media but don't blame Microsoft for it, that's the price of entry for playing this media. Come back and whine about it when Apple ships a system that plays back HD media and *DOESN'T* make exactly the same requirements. I would say come back when you can play them in LINUX without any DRM, but I'm not sure I'll live that long.
You do know that the NT4 core is extremely similar to OS/2, and the only reason they diverged is because of a fight between IBM and MS?
No it isn't it has no replationship to the OS/2 core, go read up some history on the development of the NT kernel before you make such wild claims. If it is related to anything, it's VMS.
Since when did incompetence prevent people from running for President:-) Heck, anybody looking at the US for the last 8-years would think it was a job requirement!
Microsoft stumbled with Vista; they have insisted on replacing XP on all new machines. I couldn't even buy a Dell laptop with XP a couple of weeks ago--have some specialized software that still doesn't run on Vista--had to find one from HP. Vista is late and has problems and Linux is looking better and better.
You can't have tried very hard to get DELL laptops with Xp rather than Vista, there are pretty prominent links all over the laptop section of their website and you can select XP as the installed OS rather than Vista without any difficulty at all. Large vendors like DELL or HPQ would never accept a mandate from MS to stop offereing XP when Vista launched because they know that corporates will not be ready for largescale Vista rollouts for quite some time. This is nothing new, you could get W2K on systems for a long time after XP came out.
Lots of botnets run on windows... I wonder if they could be commanded to scan for license keys.
That's actually a pretty scary thought, it's not hard to determine the install key used from an application running on the OS (there are several utilities out there today.) A botnet could e designed to get the install key and send it back to someone who could maintain a database of valid keys. This probably true for just about any application or OS that uses an install key, to be honest I'm surprised somebody hasn't already done this to XP or Office.
Quite possible, but that wasn't the point being made and to which I was responding. That said, it would be interesting to see a comparison of OSX 10.4 10.5 on three year old Macs vs. Vista and XP on 3-year old machines.
Its crippled by its limited hardware support. It simply will not run on 95% of the computers manufactured today.
What complete bullshit. Vista will run just fine on just about every machine manufactured today. You could make a case that it won't run great on hardware manufactured 2-3 years ago, but stuff manufactured is frickin designed for Vista!
With Exposé, you can see every non-hidden open window at once. Even though they may be thumbnail sized, I can go through more than a hundred windows at a time at a glance. If I need more detail, I can just look at all of the windows for a specific application.
Have you tried the keyboard shortcut ALT-TAB, it sounds much more like Expose than Flip3D does. ALT+TAB pops a window in the middle of the screen with a thumbnail of each application window, you can select a window with the mouse or "TAB" through them to the one you want to activate.
If a menu takes 1/10th of a second to appear, then you could be wasting hours of time over the course of a week or month
If I've told you once, I've told you a million times, don't exaggerate! In oder for a 1/10th second menu appearance to waste even one hour of my time I'd have to access 36,000 menus! I don't know about you, but that would take me a hell of a long time.
AMD Athlon 3000+ with 1 GB of RAM. A miracle... I know... and STILL I have to reinstall it every couple of months!!
You must be hopelessly inept at managing systems if you manage to trash an XP installation that quickly. My XP box went through beta, after which I did a clean install of the XP-RTM and never had another install until I retired the box to the Ubuntu home for aging hardware. Same went for two laptops and two more less frequently used desktops in that period, no reinstalls on any of them. What on earth are you doing?
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All that would have done is close of the PC to HD content, DRM for HD and BluRay was a done deal. What they did was implement DRM and consumers the choice of whether they want to buy DRM media or not. If you don't like DRM, don't buy content protected by it and you'll never know that DRM safeguards are in the OS.
If MS had tried to force the studios abandon DRM because of their control of the market, the MPAA would have gone to court in a heartbeat with anti-trust complaints. Which, given the anti-trust climate against MS at the time, they would have one.
I've heard lots of folks claim that DRM is some sort of MS sponsored conspiracy, but I've yet to see a rational explanation for why DRM is in MS interest since they are not a content creator, at most they are distributor of content. So please explain why MS would want strong DRM, what's the benefit to them. On the other hand the idea that MS took the path of least resistance and didn't fight DRM inflicted on the world by the MPAA is much easier to understand. Given the rather nebulous conspiracy theories vs. "the path of least resistance" I'm inclined to accept the Occam's Razor principle.
But both the BluRay and HD-DVD consortiums had to include DRM otherwise the studios had made it very clear that they would not produce HD content on those standards. So again, blaming Microsoft is missing the target, the real villains are the MPAA and the studios. I don't think MS is blamesless by any means when it comes to DRM, as you rightly point out their music-DRM efforts have been a fiasco of their own making. But just blaming MS for everything that's wrong with DRM is just plain wrong.
Implementing DRM functions in the CPU is not cowtowing to Vista, it's responding to the same rights management pressures that VISTA had to accommodate. VISTA's DRM is there to satisfy the demands of the content providers so that Vista can play back DRMed media from those providers. I know you want to blame MS for all the ills of the World, but you'd do better directing your misplaced anger at things like the BluRay consortium which make the DRM demands that Vista meets.
ROTFLMAO, here we are discussing one person's unfavorable view of using Vista for 30 days because he found it unstable, and you yell at one other person who says he doesn't see the problem, isn't his view as valid as the reviewer in the article?
My desktop which I use every day, all day ( I work from home)
2.8GHz Pentium D
2GB
ATI x700 PCI-Express graphics
total of 450GB usable of SATA RAID
My test bench
3GHz Dual Core Pentium D
4GB
Onboard ATI 1250 Express
total of 600GB of RAID 0+1
Both systems are using standard memory timings, I'm no tweaker and are on UPS, the only time they get rebooted is when MS issues a patch that requires a reboot (like the ANI patch last night)
I would go read the article in question, unfortunately it's been slashdotted :-)
I think we are in violent agreement, this tool maybe used by the few to rip content for the many.
I never said that some people wouldn't do it, I said it would be too much trouble for the vast majority.
PS. don't get me wrong, I think DRM is a fundamentally bad idea and one that is doomed to failure, I just don't this as being the answer.
Since when did incompetence prevent people from running for President :-) Heck, anybody looking at the US for the last 8-years would think it was a job requirement!
You can't have tried very hard to get DELL laptops with Xp rather than Vista, there are pretty prominent links all over the laptop section of their website and you can select XP as the installed OS rather than Vista without any difficulty at all. Large vendors like DELL or HPQ would never accept a mandate from MS to stop offereing XP when Vista launched because they know that corporates will not be ready for largescale Vista rollouts for quite some time. This is nothing new, you could get W2K on systems for a long time after XP came out.
What complete bullshit. Vista will run just fine on just about every machine manufactured today. You could make a case that it won't run great on hardware manufactured 2-3 years ago, but stuff manufactured is frickin designed for Vista!
Have you tried the keyboard shortcut ALT-TAB, it sounds much more like Expose than Flip3D does. ALT+TAB pops a window in the middle of the screen with a thumbnail of each application window, you can select a window with the mouse or "TAB" through them to the one you want to activate.
You must be hopelessly inept at managing systems if you manage to trash an XP installation that quickly. My XP box went through beta, after which I did a clean install of the XP-RTM and never had another install until I retired the box to the Ubuntu home for aging hardware. Same went for two laptops and two more less frequently used desktops in that period, no reinstalls on any of them. What on earth are you doing?
OK, so how about hitting the "Start" key on the keyboard and then starting typing which also works and doesn't require any use of the mouse.