Don’t buy DRM content and you will have no problem with Vista. DRM is a dissinsentive to the average person purchasing content online. You buy a DVD and you own it. You can play it where you like. The same is not true of DRM content. DRM content obliterates your “free use” rights that are supposedly protected under the copyright act. Until DRM is dead there will be a huge restriction on the volume of sales of online content. Everyone with a budget (or any common sense) will buy the cd or dvd instead of risking buying a limited use format available on line.

DRM is an idea desparately clung to by entertainment industry execs who are so scared of losing profits to piracy that they are missing the single biggest distribution opportunity ever created ie: the internet. Once they realise that DRM is what stops billions rather than millions of people purchasing content online they will change their tune. The recording industry has already started to wake up to this, and the movie industry will soon follow. Then MS quietlly drop DRM efforts from windows and DRM will be consigned to the dustbin of history.

Oh, like George Clooney or Tom Hanks in a war movie?

This Coupled with the implications that everything about you including banking will be on one chip on one ID Card, And the authorities simply have to deactivate your chip to effectively stop you from doing anything they don’t want you to. hmm. Seems ominous when you think about the fact that you just might be declared a terrorist for supporting piracy which according to the government “supports terrorism”. Off to the US torture prison In the bay. Welcome to The future.

Another thing I have noticed is people claiming it uses a ton of CPU, I dont know what people are playing back but in my testing I havn’t been able to push it above 4% CPU which is incendently the same maximum amount i can push out of Winamp.

testrig: AMD X2 3800+, and Vista Buisness.

Just my 2 cent.

Even though we might have a world of audiophiles and videophiles wanting to be able to watch a super sharp picture on whatever screen. Most content copied through the internet or on other media is of quite low quality by using heavy compression schemes such as XVID or MP3. And most people don’t care the quality is quite crappy. Since a lot of movies are crap themselves. You are happy to have ploughed through the film wasting some time at an airport, no matter in how great quality you could see some parts of Basic Instinct.
Most films ripped from Blue ray discs will be in a nice low res quality, in an easy do download and distributable format. No matter if you can buy a DVD with Rolling Stones live concert in 6 channel stereo, most of it will be on peoples computers, Ipods and what have you, in a basic 2ch 128kbit MP3. Trying to restrict high quality content will certainly not restrict any distribution of copy protected material. It will only make things harder for people who actually byes the the technology and its DVDs.

I simply cannot see where all these restrictions in playing high quality content will inhibit free distribution over the world. Most people will have a big bunch of low res audio/video content obtained from various sources, and then some bought material where you really want to get the most experience out of it. A sheer selling point today is what you bundle beyond the material itself, rather than the amount of pixels you will get.

“I don?t want to ever install a DVD /BluRay/HD-DVD player (that is, all I want is office-related stuff.) Why can?t MS sell me a non-mfpmp.exe (or whatever they choose to call it next), non-DRM-infested version of Windows?”

Office-related stuff? Such as text in all its forms (spreadsheets, simple word processing, E-mail, etcetera)? This is EXACTLY the content that DRM is so useful for. Want to keep your own words from being viewable by anyone other than yourself or the intended recipients? Grandma’s computer gets infected by a trojan, but you didn’t give her permission to expand the copyright on your family photos to anyone else, so she’s still the only one who can view them. Want to forward the press some evidence that your company is involved in illegal dealings? Tough luck, your boss didn’t say that anyone else could read the incriminating documents.

Quoted a CIA file that was publicly available, but which they’re now becoming embarrassed over at all the attention? They contact centralized DRM servers to notify the proper authorities that files recently classified as ’sensitive’ have been stolen and illegally reproduced without the proper protections. Nervous about the uproar caused by your expose, you’ve tried taking the precaution of disconnecting your computer from the Internet, but this only lasted a few days; then, you found out your computer would automatically downgrade its functionality and restrict access to your files if not allowed to ‘check in’ regularly, so you give it that. But the next time you ‘check in’, the DRM servers force your computer to search for ‘watermarks’ that can uniquely identify stolen content (the CIA was helpful enough to provide more such watermarks, in replacement of the ones that were previously removed to prevent identification of their classified material - unfortunately for you, this watermark happens to coincide with the quotes you were using!)

The central DRM servers revoke ALL your authentication (including those for documents YOU YOURSELF authored/owned), and - promising to launch a full investigation into their suspicions that you are guilty of even MORE piracy - globally revoke authentication for everyone ELSE on every single document that YOU have ever authored. Across the world, E-mail that you sent vanishes from people’s mailboxes. Noone can read your expose, your ten unrelated articles on fishing, or the silly poem you wrote when you were in fourth grade. NONE of it. You effectively vanish from the online world.

I aready voiced my opinion on my blog

Like having a car which only lets you go to work, but nowhere else without extra $$$

Of course the IT staff should have its collective head checked for allowing this kind of technology to be used by doctors in the first place.

For discussion, a couple of points: Suppose I don’t want to ever install a DVD /BluRay/HD-DVD player (that is, all I want is office-related stuff.) Why can’t MS sell me a non-mfpmp.exe (or whatever they choose to call it next), non-DRM-infested version of Windows? Why can’t they be compelled to do so, under the EU directive, or the last Consent Decree, or under some new class action? Hmm? Hmmm????

And why can’t artists sue MS under the same Woody Allen artistic preservation statutes - when their copyrighted art is degraded without their permission?

I build 2 Media Center 2005’s one for Satalite and one for Cable TV. Never had a problem recording my kid’s show’s. Upgraded to Vista MCE/Ultamite and like most people not able to record there “Standard definition” HBO. I cannot record the show Avatar: The last airbender. So abviously the technology existed but now with Vista’s DRM it is now being envorced much more strictly then the previous operating system’s Microsoft has made.

Sorry son. Look’s like Microsoft has implimented some new DRM technoligy in Vista that is much more restrictive then MCE 2005 was which is agreeing with someone else saying we cannot record and watch your favourate show Avatar together with your father.

I’m installing MAC. Aparently there MAC OS now has unsupported ways so it can be installed on a normal IBM PC.

Because do you realize in just 4 more years, double-quad cpu’s will be available, running on tetrabytes of RAM, and that HD space won’t even be an issue because most of it will be mainframed anyway. And Video and Sound cards will be…. I’m sure you can imagine.
And it doesn’t take long for these changes to take place according to (What’s his name’s) LAW stating the mathmatical progress of technology.

Anyway, I don’t think Bill’s too worried about how your 2.6 gig Processor and 1.5 gigs of RAM are holding up right now, because you’ll be rid of it and on to something bigger and better within the next 2-3 years the chances are.

I’m only running 2 GB’s of RAM and I’ve noticed the meter go up and the stress from mfpmp.exe however it honestly hasn’t been that much and I actually feel glad to be using the space (because in XP, I really couldn’t utilize all of my RAM without slow-down (pre dual core of couse).
NowI’m piling things on and despite filling up the RAM, things stil are nice a smooth.

Filling the RAM with XP made things real sloppy.

So if you think DRM is not good for users, if you are against it, if you don’t like working on it, you should act on it. “Following orders” and later saying you didn’t agree with it anyway doesn’t help anyone.

Hmm… Perhaps I don’t see what you’re getting at, because the more I think about it, this just doesn’t seem to rise up to a “against my principles” situation. I think it’s annoying and inconvenient, but I guess I see principles as larger things, which is why I don’t get all the consternation about this. If you want to explain why at a later date, that\’s great, but for now it seems like your position is far out of proportion to the actual issue. Perhaps you could just tell me what principle you feel DRM violates?

“Those guys blowing up children in Iraq? Just following orders.”

That’s true. If the Iraqis/radical Islamists would stop randomly murdering people who aren’t shia/shiite/non-muslim simply because the guy in the mosque told them too, Iraq would be a much nicer place right now.

That’s my point. It’s always normal people choosing to keep their jobs and doing what they are told. And then years later, we look around us and wonder how humanity got this way. If people can’t stand behind their principles in such small cases, they certainly won’t be able to when there’s even more at stake. Just look around you, it’s happening everywhere. Those guys blowing up children in Iraq? Just following orders.

Anyway, the DRM issue is not so simple as “making it inconvenient to make a backup copy of a Futurama DVD.” There’s much more at stake. But that’s for a future post.

While I believe principles are important, I’d submit that making it inconvenient to make a backup copy of a Futurama DVD is not a principle that I would plunge my family into unemployment over.

“If they REALLY wanted to stand behind their principles and valued their integrity, they would have quit and have no part in it.”

I think it’s a little unfair to paint these people as unprincipled because they chose to keep their jobs and do what they were assigned. Remember, it’s not like they were ordered to poison schoolkids or persecute minorities. This is about making media harder to enjoy on a PC.

It’s true that it would not be easy, but that’s not the reason why MS choose to do it themselves. They have their own reasons. Satisfying the content industry for business reasons, even against their own principles, would be more on target.

Also, I wasn’t saying we need MS to fight the battle against DRM. As you can see, they are on the receiving end of this whole DRM issue as well because they choose to side with the content industry.

Your sarcastic comment about Bill not being aware that DRM was in Vista was what I\?m referring to. There are plenty of times in life that you do something that you don\?t really want to do, because of economic or social necessity. Bill\?s a smart guy. If he thought he could avoid all the headache involved in the DRM deal and still get the same results (good user experience and access to content, plus the business benefit of whatever deals they have going with content producers), he would have done so.

I saw the backlash resulting from DRM coming way in advance, so I would assume he probably knew the consequences and still did it. And the likely reason why he still did it would be because of business/economics. And if that’s true, that says a lot about him. He also hasn’t been as smart as in the past recently: http://www.miraesoft.com/karel/2006/07/01/bill-gates-has-failed/
There seem to be many people at MS who also didn’t agree and didn’t like working on implementing all these DRM related things. If I was in their position, I’d have quit my job. But that’s probably just me. They made the decision to work on it and are going to have to deal with all the headache now. This not only includes the public reaction and resistance, but also the complicated task of maintaining this technology and trying to make everything work well. Judging from the issues I’m having sometimes with video/audio playback, and the fact that they are now working in overdrive to get Service Pack 1 for Vista out, they’re still struggling to get things working well.

And regarding this:

There are plenty of times in life that you do something that you don\?t really want to do, because of economic or social necessity.

Many people think this way, and that’s one of the reasons why the world is a mess today. People can’t stand behind what they believe in. They don’t have principles and are easily manipulated. I would have quit my job if I was part of the team that would have to implement DRM. I still appreciate the fact that many of those people now say they didn’t agree with it and didn’t like it, but they went along with it anyway and had part in it. If they REALLY wanted to stand behind their principles and valued their integrity, they would have quit and have no part in it. Check this out for more: http://www.miraesoft.com/karel/2007/01/15/if-you-have-nothing-to-lose-you-can-only-win/

This kind of coordination between 3rd party software and 3rd party hardware is a pretty difficult thing, and very likely to create a bad user experience. (what?! My sound card is compliant, but my video card doesn\’t work with PowerDVD 4.3 until I upgrade the bios?! Average user head explosion to follow) If this is the case, it\’s probably why Microsoft chose to do it themselves.

“As you can see, most users don?t like DRM and record companies are now seriously looking at distributing their music without DRM on the internet

” Obviously, Vista\’s support of DRM or lack of didn\’t cause this, the market did. The market doesn\’t like DRM. An example of why we don\’t need Microsoft to fight our battles.

“Why is my conclusion ridiculous? Whatever happened to having principles and standards in life and sticking to them?”

Your sarcastic comment about Bill not being aware that DRM was in Vista was what I\’m referring to. There are plenty of times in life that you do something that you don\’t really want to do, because of economic or social necessity. Bill\’s a smart guy. If he thought he could avoid all the headache involved in the DRM deal and still get the same results (good user experience and access to content, plus the business benefit of whatever deals they have going with content producers), he would have done so.