How Windows Vista treats "premium" material

Lots of reasons to be unhappy about it are detailed here:

http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.txt

Paul

Well, at least this will insure greater system and hardware reliability for your pro music recording, mixing, and mastering.

Well, at least this will insure greater system and hardware reliability for your pro music recording, mixing, and mastering.

You should have put a smiley after that statement as the system "reliability" will be INFINITE.  That is to say that the sytem will be essentially unuseable by ANYONE at ANYTIME (including for pr-music applications).  Therefore the system will be RELIABLY UNUSEABLE  100%l the time!!

Well, at least this will insure greater system and hardware reliability for your pro music recording, mixing, and mastering.

I think you need to read it again - as far as I can see, reliability is just about the one thing it's not likely to provide.  Like many other I know and have spoken to, a move to Vista iwas not on the immediate horizon for a number of reasons.  Having read through this stuff, it is even further away than ever. 

I predict Microsoft will be spending a lot of time in court again.

Well I'm either going to stick with something MS that works, or it will be Linux here I come...

I like the management overview statement though - "The longest suicide note in history".   

I could have put "-- not!" at the end of my sentence but the irony seems so obvious that I thought that would be overkill.

I could have put "-- not!" at the end of my sentence but the irony seems so obvious that I thought that would be overkill.

Unfortunately irony rarely works in print - even when it's obvious to its creator, it often isn't to anybody who isn't looking for it, or expecting it. That's partly what the eyes roll  is for...

An interesting article. It kind of confirms what I had read about their intentions a while ago. Security measures may go too far actually. The ones who are affected are very often people who use their pc's more intensively then.
And I recently ran into trouble with activating XP already. Just because my motherboard broke down and I needed to replace it and the processor. With their security measures they saw this as me installing it on a new pc, piracy in other words... I don't like these kind of things. That they can decided how I install something I bought.

I have already been testing Linux before as an alternative. But there just are so few hardware drivers out for it. To me it seems Linux is mostly adequate for surfing, checking mails, writing some letters etc. More office applications in other words.

Although I have noticed that many big companies like nVidia etc. started providing official Linux drivers.

That they can decided how I install something I bought.

Ah, but you didn't 'buy' it, you bought a pretty restricted licence to use it. And they think that they have the absolute right to control how you use your licenced copy. Unfortunately, they are correct, in law - they can legally prevent you doing certain things with it - I believe it's all in the small print that most people don't read.

But OTOH, if they actually want to sell licences to use VIsta, MS are going to need something of a rethink, because the situation described in that article makes it unworkable for just about everybody, even on the first machine it's installed on.

Come back BEOS... please!

I remember reading, when eastern Europe was still under Soviet control, that in some particular country, say Bulgaria, just to orient our eyes in the general direction, lawful access to a typewriter required a special, restricted license. I'm sure there was at least some minimal attempt to portray this as serving the general public interests, although of course it was really only in the interests of those who wanted to maximize their control over the general public. Whether or not it actually served even that purpose is another topic.

Here in the free world, restricted access to the hardware, and some means to utilize it, would not serve the interests of those who want maximum control. They also want to restively license as much mind numbing multi-media "content" as possible to the general public. Therefore this arm-flailing attempt to keep resistive weight on as many aspects of computer action potential as possible. To hell with people who still see the computer as a flexible, general purpose tool. They can go work in the bunkers of the military-industrial complex or the air conditioned vaults of the major corporations.

I wish it were so that the attempts won't sell, but I suspect that component of the market that doesn't understand, and doesn't care, is large enough to drag everyone else down with it. Maybe there will be a few baby steps backwards before the current generation if finalized, but the next version will attempt to recoup and go forward.

I remember reading, when eastern Europe was still under Soviet control, that in some particular country, say Bulgaria, just to orient our eyes in the general direction, lawful access to a typewriter required a special, restricted license. I'm sure there was at least some minimal attempt to portray this as serving the general public interests, although of course it was really only in the interests of those who wanted to maximize their control over the general public. Whether or not it actually served even that purpose is another topic.

Hmm... I seem to recall that there was at least one ex-Soviet bloc country that was running all of its government offices on illegal copies of MS software at one stage!

And apparently MS's DRM potentially has a nasty surprise in store for future users of Office as well, if they expect to be able to communicate documents freely... there's more here, and probably in a few other places as well.

I knew you guys would be on this

Its not only the DRM issues, but the hardware ones, as well as the fact that a simple brownout could just send one's computer south. Its already bad enough on the hardware side as it is, not to mention what this does for the maintenance technician.... god forbid he be having a bad day and not thinking happy Microsoft thoughts and a tilt bit gets set. And then there is the DRM business, which I am sure all of you are very concerned over...

To say I am not very happy with this development is an understatement. As I have said at another forum, its one thing for an operating system to allow malware to be run, and quite another for the operating system to be the malware, but so long as they are able to get by with it, we are all eventually going to have to deal with the consequences, regardless of the alternative. Where is the consumer in all this? After all, we are the ones actually paying, for what essentially amounts to the privilege of being raped.

After all, we are the ones actually paying, for what essentially amounts to the privilege of being raped.

Isn't that the real main funciion of government, both for itself and for it favored clients? i.e. you should be used to it by now.

http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36597
http://www.theinquirer.net/default.aspx?article=36574

I don't know the practical truth of these matters, but I'm just a bit cautious in taking a position, simply because these are matters of huge commercial consequence, and the article originally linked to has been posted all over the relevant parts of the net and treated as gospel -  meanwhile we're all well aware that not everything you read on the net is true, and the motives of those posting on the net are not always what they seem.

I had no intention of rushing into Vista - heck, this household is only going to decommission its last Win98SE PC in the next week or so! - but I'll be reading up on the aggregate real-world experiences of the early adopters with interest.

However, the Sony's experience with the hobbling of MD/Hi-MD should certainly be borne in mind by the pro-DRM people...