Windows Vista - From Whiny 2-year-old to Snotty Teenager

The BBQ Pit
81

[QUOTE=Dead Badger]
But they aren’t, and it doesn’t. Vista was moving over to a new driver model anyway, and I struggle to think of a major OS release where redevelopment of drivers wasn’t necessary.
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Microsoft could have (and should have a long time ago) moved to a model where drivers/executables are run independently from each other. Microsoft could have signed a set of generic drivers, while third party applications requiring special drivers would have access to its parent application only. Kind of what the makers of PowerDVD did. That would have taken care of the malware, and done much to protect DRM rights. And users who didn’t play back protected content wouldn’t have to install those drivers in the first place.

[QUOTE=Dead Badger]
The idea that Microsoft will fuck over their customers by disabling a competing codec, for example, is just fanciful in this day and age.
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Microsoft has done similar stuff before, including silently removing a third party codec they considered illegal in w2k and forced installation of several programs unrelated to the OS in the XP release. For Vista they considered restricting the license so that a retail copy could only be moved once to a new machine, a second move and the user would have had to buy a new copy. cite

Of course Microsoft won’t be disabling computers left and right, and that’s not the issue. The main point is that when consimers buy a third party product, control over the use of that product shouldn’t be in the hands of a single cooperation.

[QUOTE=Dead Badger]
Really: what can you do with XP that you can’t in Vista? If you don’t like the de-res restrictions, don’t buy media that enforce it. I sure as hell won’t be. But I truly don’t understand how letting the wallies that do want to play it on their PC do so affects me in any way whatsoever.
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The restrictions will be in place whether you buy protected content or not, it’s the activation of these restrictions which will depend on circumstances yet largely unknown.

However, I never said it will happen. I don’t think anybody knows that, including Microsoft. But Vista 1 probably is a transition to a stricter version or OS in the future. Certain features might disappear because they are used to, or could be used to do bad things, even though there are legitimate reasons to use such features. Not related to Microsoft, but today there are several third party programs which disables access to other programs or force them to shut down. It’s not an uncommon concept.

[QUOTE=Dead Badger]
As for Starforce, that’s a complete red herring; a shitty rootkit-esque piece of malware that takes it upon itself to actively cripple your computer.
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Heh, I said: consider this an example. There are a number of companies who has released executables with the copy protection removed some time after the initial release as a courtesy to their customers (the goal of copyright protection to stop piracy the first few months). These executables clocks in faster than protected executables, regardless of protection method.

82

[QUOTE=Alien]
The restrictions will be in place whether you buy protected content or not, it’s the activation of these restrictions which will depend on circumstances yet largely unknown.

[/quote]

No, they wont and no they aren’t. The restrictions ONLY effect media that specifically ask for them. They do not effect anything else. That is the only circumstance they come into play, it’s not a matter of “activation” it is a feature the protected medai enables. Nothing unknown about it. Period. If you buy a protected blu ray disk and try to run it on XP, it wont run. If you try to run it on Vista it will run with the protection. Thats all. It’s a non-issue as far as Microsoft is concerned. Take it up with Sony, it has nothing at all to do with Vista.

But it’s a bad example. The copy protection you speak of is something that runs on top of the application. The vista DRM is a check made when you hit play on a protected Disk…and only if the disk asks for the check. It doesnt sit there and monitor the drives like your example.
I’ve been doing this a long time, I’ve run every single version of windows ever produced…I have a copy of Windows 1.1 in box some where and still have an old compaq that will probably boot up dos something or other if I plugged it in… And every single time a new OS comes around you get hordes of people whining about this or that and how its going to be the end of microsoft and the end of computing and puppies will be stomped on and every other kind of terrible thing. I saw it with windows 3.1…I saw it with 95, and 98, and NT, and 2k, and XP…I’ll be glad when people calm down and actually use Vista.

83

[QUOTE=Alien]
Microsoft could have (and should have a long time ago) moved to a model where drivers/executables are run independently from each other. Microsoft could have signed a set of generic drivers, while third party applications requiring special drivers would have access to its parent application only. Kind of what the makers of PowerDVD did. That would have taken care of the malware, and done much to protect DRM rights. And users who didn’t play back protected content wouldn’t have to install those drivers in the first place.
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None of which changes the fact that entirely independent of any DRM concerns, drivers always require redevelopment when an OS generation shifts, so the argument that we’re somehow being saddled with an unreasonable new cost falls rather flat.

I think at this point we’re all well aware of Microsoft’s past behaviour regarding bundling, and indeed part of my point was that they’ve been hammered to shit over this sort of thing which is why it’s hardly likely at this point that they’re going to stop your computer doing things it already does. As for removal of the codec; cite? I’ve heard of no such thing. I assume you’re referring to the DivX 3.11 alpha codec, which was a hacked version of an MS codec, but can find no reference to Microsoft “deleting” it whatsoever.

What’s that got to do with the price of gravy? If you disagree with the licence terms, don’t buy it. I suggest you do the same with this so-called “premium” media.

But I think that’s a wildly paranoid and over-exaggerated description of the move to signed drivers. Fundamentally, if Microsoft start trying to dictate how you use your computer (and I see no indication that they’re desperate to do so), you can choose not to use their products. Which is precisely why I think they won’t. They may be evil, but they’re not morons. Why would they give Apple more ammunition at a time when they’re looking to break out of their minority market? Why give people more impetus to switch to Linux when it’s getting easier and easier to do so? Microsoft want you to buy this product. They’re not going to cripple it for no good reason, and you’ve presented no compelling (or even dubious) reason why they would choose to do so.

But you’re assuming some perverse incentive on Microsoft’s behalf. Why would they want to cripple people’s computers in this way? To please Hollywood? The PC business is orders of magnitude bigger than the studios, and there’s more than enough choice out there that if Vista starts deleting your media, blocking your programs and disabling your graphics card, people will go elsewhere. Even at the height of their evilness, Microsoft never actually blocked Netscape from running. What you’re suggesting they’ll do is far more ridiculous than that, and yet you seem to be perfectly at ease with the scenario. I just don’t get it.

If any of what you describe comes to pass, I will eat my hat. Yours, too.

Well, fine. As an example of something completely different which affects the computer in a way that isn’t related, to achieve a task that isn’t the same, it was an excellent one. It still has no relevance whatsoever to Vista’s software authentication scheme, though.

84

[QUOTE=Dead Badger]
What you’re suggesting they’ll do is far more ridiculous than that, and yet you seem to be perfectly at ease with the scenario. I just don’t get it.
[/QUOTE]

We constantly end up discussing DRM, but I have said that I’m in favor of it. The main point is consumer control over the products they buy. If you are against that, fine. The other main point I’ve been trying to make is vendor lockins that are made possible by the DRM ruleset. For instance, Sony might strike a deal with a small number of soundcard makers so that consumers can only play back Sony content on these soundcards.

What Microsoft has done is to facilitate this.

[QUOTE=Dead Badger]
Well, fine. As an example of something completely different which affects the computer in a way that isn’t related, to achieve a task that isn’t the same, it was an excellent one. It still has no relevance whatsoever to Vista’s software authentication scheme, though.
[/QUOTE]

Hello ? :rolleyes: I pointed out that protection mechanisms, Microsoft or no Microsoft, comes with a performance degragation (a no brainer, where do you think the computing power needed to decrypt protected content comes from??) You asked how, and told you how, and gave you a few examples. And now you call it “something completely different”?

Fine. Here’s the full answer from Dave Marsh, lead program manager for video at Microsoft, as part of his response to Gutman’s paper and also discussed in the aforementioned Wikipedia article:

85

[QUOTE=bdgr]
No, they wont and no they aren’t. The restrictions ONLY effect media that specifically ask for them. They do not effect anything else. That is the only circumstance they come into play, it’s not a matter of “activation” it is a feature the protected medai enables. Nothing unknown about it. Period. If you buy a protected blu ray disk and try to run it on XP, it wont run. If you try to run it on Vista it will run with the protection. Thats all. It’s a non-issue as far as Microsoft is concerned. Take it up with Sony, it has nothing at all to do with Vista.
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Nope. Windows also needs to disable OR prevent features which are present outside the secure path and has the ability to intercept protected content. It’s pretty likely that some of these features will disappear in the future. Don’t ask me for a cite, it’s my personal opinion.

[QUOTE=bdgr]
But it’s a bad example. The copy protection you speak of is something that runs on top of the application. The vista DRM is a check made when you hit play on a protected Disk…and only if the disk asks for the check. It doesnt sit there and monitor the drives like your example.
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My example didn’t mentioned anything about “monitoring drives” at all, you got that from your own head. See reply to Dead Badger above.

86

A couple of points I forgot while typing:

Dave Marsh of Microsoft (link above) basically confirms that the added cost of the new DRM features is passed on to all customers, but says that “that complexity comes with the direct consumer benefit of new scenarios such as HD-DVD or Blu-Ray playback”. Which is what I was arguing earlier, that the cost is passed on even to those who has no intention of using protected content and therefore receives no benefits. FWIW.

I would also like to slip in [url=]this reflection which makes for an interesting read in regards to open source and freeware development.

87

[QUOTE=Alien]
I would also like to slip in [which makes for an interesting read in regards to open source and freeware development.
[/QUOTE]
ops, fixed link is [url=Boing Boing - A Directory of Mostly Wonderful Things]here](]this reflection[/url)

88

[QUOTE=Alien]
We constantly end up discussing DRM, but I have said that I’m in favor of it. The main point is consumer control over the products they buy. If you are against that, fine.
[/quote]
I’m not against that; I think your insistence that we’re losing that control is, to be frank, paranoid and wildly exaggerated. Just look at your example:

Even assuming that this is possible under Vista’s certification scheme, which I’m pretty damn sure it isn’t: No, they won’t. I will bet you a million dollars. A million dollars and my hat. Take my wife. This will not happen. And if, in some bizarro world, it does, then you won’t be able to hear Sony’s music over the sound of a billion consumers stampeding to their competitors. This will never happen. Even Sony, who frequently appear to take business decisions by dividing a field into squares and seeing which one a cow shits in first, would never do something so profoundly stupid. And what consumer would pay for stuff with such a restriction? You seem to be persistently hypothesising a world in which everyone, without exception, behaves like an idiot. Give people some credit. This is what I don’t understand about this stuff. People invent doomsday scenarios, but blithely assume that the sheep-like masses will simply roll over and buy locked-down rubbish. Why? We’re not morons. And even the morons will be confused when their CrippledDisc won’t play on their LockBox, and will go back to CDs (or gently banging their heads against the wall).

This argument really boils down to: “What if they make something crap, and we’re so stupid we still buy it?” Well I tell you, if we get that stupid, we’ll have problems just procreating; listening to the new Timberlake album in sufficiently high fidelity will be the very least of our worries.

I think you’re confusing me with someone else (easy enough, granted, with a Badger and a bdgr knocking around). I asked for nothing; I took issue with your use of StarForce as a comparable type of copy protection. Starforce is nothing whatsoever to do with Vista. It is something completely different. It is irrelevant. Starforce degraded performance by actually lowering the data rates from many people’s optical drives at all times, and in some extreme cases prevented them from operating at all. It is a rubbish example. It does not even vaguely hint at the idea that people using Vista will find their performance degraded by DRM when not using the DRM.

There. That’s relevant. But still, performance degradation is not measured in “extra CPU cycles”. Are the videos going to play at 90% speed? No. Is our music going to get inadvertently pitch-shifted? No. Performance is measured in output, not in input cost. We’ve got a lot more CPU cycles these days, and they’re going to get used for something. Even my crappy old box is sitting here running WinAmp, WinEdt and a browser and is rarely topping 10% CPU use. And once again, the performance hit will only occur if you’re playing DRM’d media, so you have the choice of whether to incur it, which is why the StarForce example was crap.

As for the “cost” being passed on to everyone, well sure; but it’s a tiny proportion of the total development cost, and is one of positively hundreds of features you won’t use. Many more people are likely to want to play HD-DVDs on their machines (the vast majority will by the time Vista is obsolete, I would expect). This feature is going to get used by millions, like it or not; why pick on this feature, and declare that it shouldn’t be in the OS because you won’t use it? Why not the remote desktop? Why not the user migration tool? I’ve never used that. Why not the new Windows PowerShell; hell, if even 1% of users regularly touch that puppy I’ll be astounded. Your computer does all sorts of shit you’ll never use; why is this new feature a particular problem for you?

Finally, for all that you’ve said hardware manufacturers should just “do it in hardware like they do for standalone players”, you’ve completely ignored that this, too, represents a huge undertaking, involving the collaboration of a vast array of disparate motherboard, optical drive, graphics cards and soundcard manufacturers to provide a secure path in any of a bewildering number of combinations of devices. I can’t possibly see how this can be simpler than doing it in software, if it’s practically possible at all. It’s easy for all-in-one players to do it in hardware; they’ve got one set of components to deal with - their own. How you intend to get what will in effect be a completely new data bus technology implemented and supported across the PC world in the same time and for less money than it costs to create a secure software path is a bit puzzling.

89

[QUOTE=Sunspace]
Technically, it can. There is nothing stopping MS or Apple or anyone from doing it that way. MS has chosen to add these extra steps and restrictions to satisfy their agreements with the MPAA. I presume the same is true of Apple.
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Not strictly correct. What Uncommon Sense described was a hardware solution, using approx $10 worth of wires and chips exactly as found in a cheap chinese-made disc player. MS (and probably Apple) will never ever ever ever ever x10^86 do it that way, because the hardware route means customers not building their lives around a software-based ‘media centre’ such as an Xbox or PC and therefore giving all their money to Circuit City, Toshiba, Panasonic and the like rather than to Microsoft as God intended. I mean, where would we be if people bought cheap purpose-dedicated lumps of hardware that plugged together with standard cables and worked reliably when the appropriate buttons were pushed? :eek:

90

[QUOTE=Dead Badger]
Finally, for all that you’ve said hardware manufacturers should just “do it in hardware like they do for standalone players”, you’ve completely ignored that this, too, represents a huge undertaking, involving the collaboration of a vast array of disparate motherboard, optical drive, graphics cards and soundcard manufacturers to provide a secure path in any of a bewildering number of combinations of devices.
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Already been done, surely? Since there is, after all, no point in having all this software DRM if you could buy a $50 dongle that would stream a DRM’d video signal straight into a non-DRMd vidcap at full resolution.

91

[QUOTE=Alien]

Hello ? :rolleyes: I pointed out that protection mechanisms, Microsoft or no Microsoft, comes with a performance degragation (a no brainer, where do you think the computing power needed to decrypt protected content comes from??) You asked how, and told you how, and gave you a few examples. And now you call it “something completely different”?

Fine. Here’s the full answer from Dave Marsh, lead program manager for video at Microsoft, as part of his response to Gutman’s paper and also discussed in the aforementioned Wikipedia article:
[/QUOTE]

That isn’t performance degradation and it doesnt effect anything but the protected content anyway. If your not playing protected content it doesn’t effect you.

92

[QUOTE=Alien]
Nope. Windows also needs to disable OR prevent features which are present outside the secure path and has the ability to intercept protected content. It’s pretty likely that some of these features will disappear in the future. Don’t ask me for a cite, it’s my personal opinion.

[/quote]

what does that have to do with anything I said?

No, I got that from your using the stardock example. It is why your example has nothing to do with what we are discussing.

93

[QUOTE=slaphead]
Already been done, surely? Since there is, after all, no point in having all this software DRM if you could buy a $50 dongle that would stream a DRM’d video signal straight into a non-DRMd vidcap at full resolution.
[/QUOTE]
Nope; that is not a bus technology to allow, say, your optical drive to talk to your graphics or sound cards via a secure channel. It is a specification for the encryption of data over just the DVI/HDMI link.

To implement an end-to-end secure content channel independently of the OS would require a completely new bus technology in parallel to all the existing ones (or some extension of them), and would require dedicated hardware to do all the stuff that was done in software before (decryption, decoding). This stuff isn’t included in most graphics cards, y’know, and certainly isn’t in your DVD drives. This in turn would require masses of re-work, the obsoletion of just about all hardware out there, and the subversion of the whole point of PCs in the first place, viz. their ability to bind together all sorts of hardware and control them through a common interface, namely the OS.

And this is without even getting into the fact that as distribution moves more and more online, the decoding of the media is going to be intrinsically software-driven. In five years, when you’re downloading HD content from whatever online store, how are you going to insist that this is played solely in hardware? You’d have to offload the encrypted file directly to the graphics card, and have that handle the decryption and decoding. So now we’re assuming that our graphics cards will be able to decode in hardware any future video format that we might care to play. Sound reasonable? It doesn’t to me. I just don’t get it. It seems like an absolute minefield of problems and complexity, to achieve … what?

The whole point of PCs is that you do stuff in software. They’re general purpose machines that do lots of tasks with common hardware; that’s why they’re so great. Why are we suddenly insisting that “avoiding the OS” is a desirable thing?

94

Well, it better not suck, that’s all I have to say… I’m currently upgrading as we speak. I don’t know what possessed me to abandon Linux, but I guess I’m challenging Microsoft: “Okay, this is your last chance. Impress me.” My only real gripe with Microsoft, I guess, is that it’s so fucking expensive just to keep things going and I’m not exactly rolling in green.

95

[QUOTE=Dead Badger]
Nope; that is not a bus technology to allow, say, your optical drive to talk to your graphics or sound cards via a secure channel. It is a specification for the encryption of data over just the DVI/HDMI link.
[/quote]

Yes. It could therefore allow your HD-DVD drive to talk directly to your graphics card which could then talk directly to your monitor, without any intervention from windows necessary. Exactly as in the aforementioned disposable players from Walmart. Whether the hardware manufacturers have to invest a few tens of millions of transistors to implement either hardware decoding or Vista-compatible DRM is up to them - they can do one, or the other, or both, or neither. There’s no law of nature that says that it HAS to be done via the OS.

[QUOTE=Dead Badger]

And this is without even getting into the fact that as distribution moves more and more online, the decoding of the media is going to be intrinsically software-driven.

[/quote]

If the software companies have their way. They do, after all, have quite an interest in pushing this. The TV, consumer electronics and media content companies seem to be a little more agnostic.

[QUOTE=Dead Badger]

The whole point of PCs is that you do stuff in software. They’re general purpose machines that do lots of tasks with common hardware; that’s why they’re so great. Why are we suddenly insisting that “avoiding the OS” is a desirable thing?
[/QUOTE]

We’re not. We’re just objecting to having a general purpose machine used for almost everything BUT playing films and watching TV dramatically reconfigured to allow Microsoft to expand from the niche where it enjoys 90+% market share (general productivity, web browsing and games) into the living room, and pointing out that it does not necessarily HAVE to be this way. The whole argument that ‘the media companies made us do it at gunpoint’ is blatant garbage. They’d much rather people watch TV and films on cable or hard media, because it’s far less piracy-prone.

TV, DVD, etc. have managed just fine so far without doing it all in software - in fact you can probably get a dedicated hardware player capable of playing back just about every standard-def movie format for less than the price of something like Power-DVD. Having an all-singing, all-dancing, all-obstructing multimedia operating system in charge of your digital entertainment is not the only way - just the only way that Microsoft and Apple would like you to choose.

96

[QUOTE=slaphead]
Yes. It could therefore allow your HD-DVD drive to talk directly to your graphics card which could then talk directly to your monitor, without any intervention from windows necessary.
[/quote]
No, it really can’t. Not without it being designed into all the hardware. I don’t mean to be rude, but I don’t think you really know what you’re talking about here. HDCP is an encryption spec; it needs a secure path to work. In standalones that happens effectively for free because there’s no user access to anything but the final output. In PCs, where you’ve got discrete components talking to each other across buses via the OS (that’s how PCs work, remember), you either need to provide an entirely new secure bus, or implement a secure path in software. You can’t just wave your hands, say, “oh, well use HDCP,” and have it be true. It doesn’t work like that.

Of course not; it’s just easier, cheaper, more flexible, and doesn’t require the obsoletion of every bit of PC hardware out there. Other than that, yeah, there’s hardly any advantage.

As for the rest, you seem to be saying roughly (if you’ll permit me to paraphrase) that you’re not convinced that PCs will become media centres, therefore they shouldn’t even try. This just seems wrong to me. Are you worried that the focus on media will stop them being productivity centres, too? Hardly; Microsoft’s heartland is the office computer - they’re not going to stop catering to that side of things. But they think a media centre is a good idea, and they’d like to offer you one. Of course they’re going to do it in software; that’s where their expertise is, and it offers a large number of possibilities that all-in-one boxes can’t. You may not think online distribution is going to take off (although how anyone could reach this conclusion is beyond me, since it already has); Microsoft do, and have made a product to facilitate that.

If you’re not going to use this feature, it doesn’t affect you. Why on earth would it bother you that it’s offered to those who might actually want it? This is how the consumer market works - manufacturers offer products with new features; people buy them if they want. You don’t want? Don’t buy. Simple as. Be happy with XP. I know I am.