![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thewayneA 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?
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?
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2006-12-27 09:47 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2006-12-28 03:25 am (UTC)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.