So I see it as them just being money hungry bastards.
Your new hardware is already brokenIt is a grand schemeBy Charlie Demerjian: Friday 05 August 2005, 08:41CURRENT LARGE COMPUTER VENDORS, monitor makers, graphics card people and most notably Microsoft are being way dodgy with their current offerings. Why? DRM (Digital Rights Management) of course.Anyone reading this knows my position on this topic, the weasels feel that they are not making enough money every time you view content. So, to make up for this, they are forcing you to pay more and ultimately stripping you of your rights through invasive DRM.The dodgy part comes with current offerings, they are broken under LongVista, all of them. The High-Bandwidth Digital Copy Protection (HDCP) or User Reaming to Maximize Profit (URMP – pronounced 'your rump', quite fitting) means your current brand spanking new media centre PC, should you be dumb enough to buy one, will not work when Shorthorn comes out.Yes, if you want to watch overpriced media, you need URMP. If you don't have it, your shiny new $2000 media centers and gaming stations will put up a blank screen, or if you are eminently lucky, a fuzzy image. This is to protect 'them', not you, which is why HDCP is such a stealth-evil acronym, people don't ask who is being protected, the sheeple just spend.So, you are buying these machines, $1200 24-inch Dell monitors, $500 Nvidia GPUs, all exceedingly nice hardware BTW, and they are all broken. You are pissing your money away. Assume a three year lifespan for most hardware, probably more if you buy a pimped out SLi rig with a dual everything a a huge monitor. Sure, you are spending more than the cost of a decent car, but it really is a nice machine.Won't you be surprised that in a year or so, your slightly less new, but still blazingly fast machine is now a doorstop. You won't be able to legally play content, and there is no realistic upgrade path. There are boxes, adaptors and eSwizzle-sticks(TM) that will make things possibly work, but they will cost more than new hardware, and almost assuredly will have less functionality.So, where is the dodgy part? Well, they know this now, and are merrily taking your money on knowingly defective hardware. Anyone who thinks that ShortVista won't make up 85% plus of the OSes sold in the near future is crazy. With lengthening hardware life cycles, it is also fairly probable that a large number of the installations out there will be upgraded to this DRM infested nightmare.Hardware vendors are selling you this now, and it won't work in the future. They also know it won't work, because if it would, they would be shouting it from every rooftop. So, if you are in the market right now, you have two choices. You can get something that is broken, but that is hidden from you, or you can wait. If you wait, you get URMP tainted hardware that strips you of your rights, but you get to pay more.Basically, you are a pawn in a grand plot to funnel more money into the RIAA and MPAA member companies. Your rights? Fair play? All casualties. They know, and they are actively hiding it from you, yet you feed them more each time.
Windows XP has gotten old , but windows is already a resource hog as it is for people on 256 or less ram , will it become one for those on 512 ? if so i'll say screw microsoft and use windows Xp 64 till i upgrade....
I'm not to worried about the anti- piracy stuff, hackers and crackers out there are light years more talented than those who design the security...
Microsoft weakens OpenGLVista could be part of a D3D pushBy Nick Farrell: Monday 08 August 2005, 06:47THE OPENGL Foundation claims that the software giant, Microsoft is trying to shaft its free specification with the introduction of its super soar-away version of its Windows operating system Vista.The foundation has issued a call to arms here, over Vole’s plan to layer OpenGL over Direct3D in Vista.Users need to have a composited desktop to obtain what Vole spinsters dub the 'Aeroglass experience'. However, the foundation fears that if an OpenGL Installable Client Driver is run under Vista, the desktop compositor will switch off and the performance will be pants.It seems that at the heart of the problem is the fact that Vista’s new interface and driver model uses DirectX in a slightly new way. These changes have had a knock on effect with other 3d graphics APIs.Vole’s changes could force game developers to program in DirectX to take better advantage of Vista features and make it harder to port to other operating systems in OpenGL.According to the Foundation this means that if you use Vista, OpenGL performance will be slashed by half, limited and there would be no extensions will be possible to cope with future hardware innovations. The foundation does not have a clue why Vole is doing this.It says it is technically straightforward to provide an OpenGL ICD within Vista.It thinks that layering OpenGL over Direct3D is all part of a cunning plan and the OpenGL community should encourage hardware & software developers, and lean on the Vole to maintain OpenGL as a first class API.It fears that if the ‘cunning plan’ is successful, games developers could move away from OpenGL and toward Vole's own Direct3D standard.QuoteNow why would they really do something like that? I mean OS X runs on OpenGL and beautifully, fast and without clunky DX... so what is their REAL intention by doing this? I would really laugh if lornhorn turned out to be a white elephant thats widely UN-accpeted... but that would happen in an ideal world. Ah well. Bring on the lack of rights!!!
Now why would they really do something like that? I mean OS X runs on OpenGL and beautifully, fast and without clunky DX... so what is their REAL intention by doing this? I would really laugh if lornhorn turned out to be a white elephant thats widely UN-accpeted... but that would happen in an ideal world. Ah well. Bring on the lack of rights!!!
Some more MS crap:QuoteMicrosoft weakens OpenGLUsers need to have a composited desktop to obtain what Vole spinsters dub the 'Aeroglass experience'. However, the foundation fears that if an OpenGL Installable Client Driver is run under Vista, the desktop compositor will switch off and the performance will be pants.Vole’s changes could force game developers to program in DirectX to take better advantage of Vista features and make it harder to port to other operating systems in OpenGL.
Microsoft weakens OpenGLUsers need to have a composited desktop to obtain what Vole spinsters dub the 'Aeroglass experience'. However, the foundation fears that if an OpenGL Installable Client Driver is run under Vista, the desktop compositor will switch off and the performance will be pants.Vole’s changes could force game developers to program in DirectX to take better advantage of Vista features and make it harder to port to other operating systems in OpenGL.
By: Sander SassenI’ve described DRM, digital rights management, as the holy grail of the movie and music industry before; it is generally perceived as their ticket to safeguard their inflated profit margins and a tool to breathe new life into their obsolete business models. DRM protected content allows them to control exactly how this content is used, distributed, and above all, can be tracked right down to the individual end user. DRM protected content is protected by an elaborate encryption scheme and can only be unlocked and played back if you follow and adhere to the requirements set forth by the producer exactly. This could mean that he only grants you the right to playback the DRM protected DVD you bought once, or dictates that you can only do so a set number of times. For DRM to work however, especially on the PC, you’d ideally need hardware support, so that both hard- and software work together to make sure the protection scheme is in no way circumvented.Up until now the movie and music industry has been unable to partner with the likes of Microsoft or Intel to make this a reality. Microsoft’s Windows XP featured DRM, but only on a software level and Intel has hinted at a platform with DRM for a few years now, but never followed through with the concept. With the arrival of Microsoft Windows Vista and Intel’s VIIV home entertainment concept both Microsoft and Intel have however sold out to the music and movie industry and their unbridled greed. Microsoft’s Vista will, amongst other things, feature something that’s called the Output Content Protection, which is a first implementation of the NGSCB, Next Generation Secure Computing Base, the infamous platform formerly known as Palladium. This prohibits the output of protected video content unless you have HDCP, High bandwidth Digital Content Protection, support on your display. Currently a very small percentage, less than 1%, of shipping monitors support this and hence will allow you to view such content.Intel’s VIIV is the proverbial icing on the cake, a home entertainment concept adding the needed hardware support to supplement the features as found in Windows Vista. And unlike the concept platform Intel has shown us in the past, VIIV Fork will start shipping in the first quarter of 2006, quite in time for the release of Windows Vista. The combination of the two will mean that you, the end-user, will be royally screwed in every way, shape and form. That’s right, once VIIV Fork and Vista ship you can forget about exercising your fair-use rights, no more converting songs to MP3, no more music downloads to- and from friends and family, no more DivX movies, and the list goes on. But more disturbing is the fact that new content will only be able to playback on the new platform, there, for example, will be no (legal) Linux support or support in other operating systems. Simply because any such media player, able to playback this content, will circumvent the protection scheme that is DRM, which is illegal. Basically fair use and your rights as a consumer are out of the window when VIIV Fork and Vista arrive.With VIIV Intel has given the music and movie industry the tools to force the consumer to give up its rights and abide by their rules and has handed the keys to unlock the protection scheme to Microsoft. Looking at the track record of the music and movie industry and their watchdogs the RIAA and MPAA you can rest assured that when this platform is introduced they’ll use any possible legal avenue to further limit how you can use their content. And more importantly they’ll also make sure you pay a substantial amount of money for any use of their content that before was labeled as fair use, such as converting songs to MP3 for example. So thanks Intel and thanks Microsoft for selling out, you’ve now clearly shown us that these new features are meant to better your revenue and profits, not the computing experience of the end user. Or rather, you’ve sided with the music and movie industry and their unbridled greed and clearly don’t care one bit about what the end user wants. I guess money talks after all.Ed.
