A while back, I wandered into one of the big box stores. As always, laptops are among the first things I browse, but this day, there wasn't a laptop in sight; or a desktop either, for that matter.

"Vista," the salesman explained, "We cleared out all our XP computers yesterday. We get our shipment with Vista tonight..."

That seemed odd at the time, and it seems even odder now.

~

"Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called “premium content"...incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost ... the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it's not used directly with Vista...
...
"However, one important point to keep in mind ... is that in order to work, Vista's content protection must be able to violate the laws of physics, something that's unlikely to happen no matter how much the content industry wishes that it were possible."
--Peter Gutman

~

I started to see the light when I was playing one of my little jingles in Windows Media Player, and the Microsoft ap offered to let me go online and buy my own tune!

I'd had a hunch some of my audio problems might stem from content protection built into the o/s, and once I'd focused my online searches in this direction, answers began to emerge, particularly from the source of the quotes above:
<ahref=""http://www.w3c.org/TR/1999/REC-html401-19991224/loose.dtd">Peter Gutman's brilliant, entertaining exposé of Vista's content protection schemes..

I've just skimmed the technical portions of this lengthy, but highly informative and extremely well written article, but several paragraphs in, I'd already read enough to have my suspicions confirmed. No doubt, workarounds will emerge. Cracks have already appeared in the brick shuthouse. Anything written by man can be cracked by man, but I wish we could get some of these people working on Linear A.

I didn't think there'd ever be a reason for me to consider getting a Mac or tangling with Linux, but this latest mistake by Microsoft has done it. I'll do a little monkeying around to get what I want, but Microsoft's ill-conceived protection schemes create too many additional complications for me to justify investing in a Vista system, even if it costs me $90 for that knowledge.

By most standards, this Gateway is a sweet little box, and I can almost justify keeping it, but Vista's internal machinations compel me to reject this operating system and the horse it rode in on. I bet XP would scream on this little pony, but getting XP aboard would take some effort, and critical drivers might not exist. I'm going to look at Dell's econobox XP line-up.

As some of the comments to the article suggest, Microsoft's copy-protection schemes will only encourage piracy and defections to rivals. As Gutman himself puts it in his "Executive Executive summary:

The Vista Content Protection specification could be the longest suicide note in history."


Even more troubling to me are the applications this technology has for censorship. If they can control the media, they can control the news - not that they already don't. It's disturbing enough that the walls may have ears; in the future, coming to a wintel econobox near you, the ears may have walls as well.

S