"A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection"

[thewayne]

A 7,000 word study as to what Microsoft's "Premium Content Protection" will truly cost you and your computer. It is not pretty. Hmmm... Premium Content Protection... PCP... a coincidence?

It's a long read and gets very techie at times, but it's important. Basically Vista is probably going to drive up hardware costs and will downgrade audio and video quality if any non-premium content is mixed with premium content. It is especially troubling to the medical imaging field where any lossy compression is expressly forbidden because artifacts added when the image is uncompressed can result in mis-diagnosis. So if you're playing an MP3 CD while looking at x-rays, a whole bunch of people could be in trouble because this degradation is done silently and in real-time.

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

It will be very interesting to see Microsoft's response to this article and the ensuing arguments back and forth. Meanwhile, one absolute truth remains: even though Vista only currently exists for corporate use and will not be available to consumers until late January, six serious security flaws have already been discovered.

It boils down to this: as long as this Hollywood protectionism is as pervasively integrated into the OS as it is, I won't buy Vista for my personal use. I know my campus of the university that I work at won't be buying it for at least two years, and considering all the weird stuff that we use, who knows if we will be able to make it work then?

When I have the money, I'm going Mac. There are two programs that currently keep me in the Windows arena: Microsoft SQL Server and Microsoft Access. My skill with SQL Server hasn't done anything to get me a job, so maybe I'd be better off going to Oracle, I know there's a lot more Oracle in my area than SQL Server. And what I'm doing in Access can be done in other products, just not as easily. So why should I pay money to MS for an OS that by design will slow down system performance?

Comments

[chirssly.livejournal.com]

You can connect OS X to a SQL Server database with only a little craziness. I had to figure out how to do it for work--- OK, I wasn't a project I was on but I contributed anyway.

For whatever reason, OS X doesn't ship with an ODBC driver but there are third party ones. I used FreeTDS because, well, it's free but commercial drivers are available too. OpenOffice doesn't seem to like the FreeTDS driver and I didn't have the patience to get UnixODBC working though I was able to use the command line tools to query the database as a proof of concept. I'm sure there are GUI database tools that will work on OS X, but I only needed to make the connection for the proof of concept before the moved on to something else.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

I would guess that OS X doesn't have ODBC drivers because of the 'base' antagonism between MS & Apple. They cooperate on some things, battle in others. I think this might be a battle area even though Apple doesn't do a database system and is therefore not competing with MS in this area.

Since SQL Server can be communicated with through direct TCP sockets, ODBC becomes a convenience, not a requirement. Your main issue will be having to have a Windows server to run SQL Server and provide your SQL Server management console GUI which will only run on a Windows server. I believe that you can run most management commands as Transact-SQL statements through a connection, it's just tremendously easier doing it through the Windows GUI.

[silveradept]

Vista is an OS designed around DRM, rather than having some DRM designed for the OS. This is why I'm already getting extensive Linux training. I sacrifice a lot of my ability to play games, until it becomes possible for Linux systems to emulate or have support for the DirectX API, but after that point, I should be fine running on what I have.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

Your first sentence is very telling, I never thought of it in those terms. I'm going to continue running XP and 2000 Pro because they work just fine, and as long as I'm selective about my hardware, the support will continue. It may not be the latest and greatest, but considering XP will handle multi-core CPUs and such, what does Vista offer except hassles?

I really like Unix for a server environment, but I don't think it's a suitable desktop replacement for normal office productivity. But I'm more interested in the server side myself, that and database development/administration.

So I think Mac OS-X will be a pretty good fit for me. It'll give me Photoshop and some good web tools, I'll have Unix underneath the hood, and all should be well once I reprogram the delete and backspace keys to behave properly. ;-)

As far as game playing is concerned, all I'm playing right now is Warcraft, and that runs just fine on a Mac. Future games? We'll have to see then, no telling what's 5+ years down the road.

[silveradept]

XP will likely eventually have support phased out. Admittedly, it took Microsoft nearly 10 years to phase out Windows 98 support, so there's probably plenty of time for them to get it right, or at least bearable.

Unix doesn't have a particuarly good and dominant office suite. OpenOffice is as close as it gets, but there are some things it still doesn't handle well, and the Unix environment is usually behind on Microsoft replication because Microsoft generally doesn't release specs, and from what I've heard, doesn't do a whole lot for good code documentation on APIs and the like. OSX will give you a good application suite as well as some Unix kernel poewr under the hood. With the Intel chipsets, you'll be able to get where you need to go for a while. It's a good solution. If I were to purchase a portable computer, it would be an Intel Mac so that I could dual-boot it.

Games are rather fickle, yes. As I've said, the thing I see that holds most people back from switching over to Mac or Unix-based computing is the lack of ability to play commercial games on Unix-type machines. I'm laying the fault of that squarely at the inability of DirectX to work. Once it does and does well, I think a lot of people will be more inclined to hop over, especially if Vista continues to be a morass of DRM. I don't think people are going to be happy to find that all the stuff that worked just fine on XP doesn't work at all on Vista.

[thewayne.livejournal.com]

XP support will probably start dying in 5 years or so, that's about the normal timeframe for them to drop support. They're currently ramping down support on the 2000 family, but it's still perfectly viable as long as you practice safe computing and keep your firewalls up. The main problem will be finding drivers for newer hardware on an older OS platform.

When you consider that Windows 2000 will be seven years old in two months, that's pretty darn good. As far as I'm concerned, the only advantage that XP offers over 2000 is support for newer hardware that was engineered after 2000's release. So XP should be viable until at least 2015 on what is now contemporary hardware.