Does the "Wow" start now? Created 17 years ago2007-01-30 13:16:27 UTC by alexb911

An interesting and detailed look at the cost of what is pretty much Vista's main feature: obnoxious and heavy DRM. Paying ?250 for an operating system designed by Hollywood studios seems sensible to me. Why have stability and efficency when you can have the inability to play music and video properly?

Oh, and of course, that isn't quite enough for Microsoft, is it? No, they set the pricing for Vista with an exchange rate of 1USD = 1GBP, so the top edition in America is $250 while in England... it's about ?250!

yeah, Vista to me is Windows for people who think downloading an mp3 from generic_free_mp3_site.com is 'hacking' and guessing someone's password for their MSN or Myspace is 'bypassing protocols.'

People like Exos and Orpheus, really.

(I have 4 gigs but meh)

Uber.
Leet.
A bit of a over-kill prehaps?

I love drm, it keeps those nasty internet pirates away from music.

Needs more secret Nazi Habboi.

@ The Hunter - http://www.ctrlaltdel-online.com/comic.php?d=20030606

4 GB of RAM is like you never have to close a program and you can still play a game on top of all your open programs.

That article that Alex linked to is a good, fairly non-biased and somewhat amusing outline of the flaws of Vista's content protection system. In particular, the section at the end which highlights some of the responses Microsoft sent, which don't deny the attacks on the OS, but instead confirm them.

An interesting read, if a bit tech-y.

Hey, I understood it :D.

After reading some parts of it, It seems to me that there will be an important boycott to this new OS.
DRM only makes things harder for users of legitimate content, which seems very stupid as the number of those users will decrease and sales will drop even more.
People are quite happy with DivX, Xvid etc. We've been watching films at normal TV resolution for decades. "High Definition" is not a real priority among casual people, or at least that's my impression.

Anyway, Microsoft can always make a patch disabling internet capability for XP, forcing the whole world to move to Vista

microsoft would do the world a favor disabling IE

An interesting point that was made on that article was that when you think "High Definition", your mind doesn't instantly then think "Windows Based PC". You're more likely to go towards more consumer based electronics, like TVs, DVD players and the like.

Saying that "Hollywood forced them" is just shit: Microsoft doesn't need Hollywood, Hollywood needs them.

Is everybody bashing it now? Yes.

Are all games probably going to become Vista only? Yes.

At one point or another will everybody start to get it?

Yes, whether you like it or not.

That's what will happen if this is like XP was when it first came out. Most of you probably haven't even used Vista yet, so I don't see why everybody is judging it. Then they say they love Linux and shit, which is perfectly ok, but still, I can't help but make a comparison to kids to label themselves gangsta or whatnot just to be "cool".

But hey, let people do what they want. I, personally, am going to try to get a chance to try it first before I make any judgments.

Ok, I probably just pissed of someone with that post, but I'll think what I want.

I'd try reading that article before posting. It gives concrete reasons why Vista sucks ass. XP didn't have any where near the same level of DRM bullshit that Vista does. Read that article: it will make you scared of Vista.

The only reason games are going to become Vista only is because Microsoft went and made DX10 a Vista only development, which is just greedy. Totally and utterly.

The fact that Vista users are getting Halo 2, a game that's been on the Xbox for freakin' ages is ludicrous. And guess what: it's apparently Vista only! Thanks Microsoft, I'm sure people would love to pay a full RRP on a game that's how many years old now...

Halo 2 is only about 2 years old now. In case you haven't noticed, that's not as old as Half-Life, and about as old as Half-Life 2.

As for concrete evidence, my own concrete eveidence on whether it sucks or not is my experience after i trying it first. I personally think everybody is jumping on the "I hate Vista" bandwagon, just for the hell of it. If I agree with that after I try it, I'll jump on too. But I haven't tried it yet, so I'm not going to go any further.

The complaints about Vista go well past it's stupid interface. It's the intrinsic and mostly unknown operations that work underneath the surface that are cause for alarm. The most pertinent examples are people not being able to play content they've already purchased, having to play what MS call "Premium Content" on outdated hardware, stuff like the S/PDIF protocol being completely disabled...

Read the damn article and then see where all this 'flaming' is coming from.

Are all games probably going to become Vista only? Yes.

I depends on what OS people have. Have you ever seen the study done periodically in STEAM to see what systems people have? I doubt we would see Vista-only games from Valve if their target customers are less. And many other game companies would think the same.
HL1 will not be Vista-only, so I feel safe in a way.

Older games won't, but games that require DX10 will.

Fuck you Microsoft, seriously.

In an interview with Valve in PC Gamer, it seems like they said Vista would do nothing but make their job harder, but that may have been an entirely different topic... I'll look that up.

In any case, I can't see Valve ditching half their user base by making Steam (or even one engine) incompatible with older operating systems. I think Steam still works with Windows 98, doesn't it?

What I mean is, this is totally unpredictable. Of course nobody knows how it really ticks, its been out for less than a day in the mainstream market. Most games, however, ARE going to start using DirectX 10, which is pretty much Vista only, unless someone cracks it. But even if somebody does crack it, it will most likely be unstable.

I say we all sit back and enjoy the show.

And I never said anyone was flaming.

dx10 wont be mainstream for game devs until next year, probably. people are still using dx9 engines, source, doom3, unreal3, etc. (not sure if unreal3 is dx10 compatible atm)

until these engines are updated for dx10 or new engines are written, games will continue to use dx9.

i mean, the only game that has been announced to use dx10 is crysis, right? have any other games been announced for dx10?
even crysis works with dx9, too. just as source works on dx7/8 video cards.

judging by that, games will be able to be played on XP until directX 12 comes out...

Well, I tried reading the article, and didn't make i much past the first 2 paragrahs before I faded out of consiousness and declared Um... wtf am I reading again?

Maybe somebody could give a nice simple summary of the main points? If it's true that this content protetion is going to impede the flow of free stuff, but not really protect it--an annoyance more than anything--, and that it is going to take up a considerable chunk of system resources is really very discouraging.

It never ceases to amaze me that no matter how fast we make processors or how cheap ram/HDD space become, we keep coming up with bullshit like this to bog it down

Can't someone "clone" windows so we don't have to put up with this ever-increasing bullshit from microsoft? (Or does it take like 30 years till somebody can legally do that ?) /rant /crying

Here's some memorable points from the article. I've removed some of the more techy bits.

The same issue that affects graphics cards also goes for high-resolution LCD monitors. One of the big news items at CES 2007 was Samsung's 1920x1200 HD-capable 27" LCD monitor, the Syncmaster 275T, released at a time when everyone else was still shipping 24" or 25" monitors as their high-end product. The only problem with this amazing HD monitor is that Vista won't display HD content on it because it doesn't consider any of its many input connectors (DVI-D, 15-pin D-Sub, S- Video, and component video) secure enough. So you can do almost anything with this HD monitor except view HD content on it.

...

Vista's content protection mechanism only allows protected content to be sent over interfaces that also have content-protection facilities built in. Currently the most common high-end audio output interface is S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format). Since S/PDIF doesn't provide any content protection, Vista requires that it be disabled when playing protected content [Note E]. In other words if you've sunk a pile of money into a high-end audio setup fed from an S/PDIF digital output, you won't be able to use it with protected content.

...

Vista requires that any interface that provides high-quality output degrade the signal quality that passes through it if premium content is present. This is done through a "constrictor" that downgrades the signal to a much lower-quality one, then up-scales it again back to the original spec, but with a significant loss in quality. So if you're using an expensive new LCD display fed from a high-quality DVI signal on your video card and there's protected content present, the picture you're going to see will be, as the spec puts it, "slightly fuzzy", a bit like a 10-year-old CRT monitor that you picked up for $2 at a yard sale

...

Amusingly, the Vista content protection docs say that it'll be left to graphics chip manufacturers to differentiate their product based on (deliberately degraded) video quality. This seems a bit like breaking the legs of Olympic athletes and then rating them based on how fast they can hobble on crutches.

...

The Microsoft specs say that only display devices with more than 520K pixels will have their images degraded (there's even a special status code for this, STATUS_GRAPHICS_OPM_RESOLUTION_TOO_HIGH), but conveniently omit to mention that this resolution, roughly 800x600, covers pretty much every output device that will ever be used with Vista. The abolute minimum requirement for Vista Basic are listed as 800x600 resolution (and an 800MHz Pentium III CPU with 512MB of RAM, which seems, well, ?wildly optimistic? is one term that springs to mind). However that won't get you the Vista Aero interface, which makes a move to Vista from XP more or less pointless. The minimum requirements for running Aero on a Vista Premium PC are ?a DX9 GPU, 128 MB of VRAM, Pixel Shader 2.0, and minimum resolution 1024x768x32?, and for Aero Glass it's even higher than that. In addition the minimum resolution supported by a standard LCD panel is 1024x768 for a 15" LCD, and to get 800x600 you'd have to go back to a 10-year-old 14" CRT monitor or something similar. So in practice the 520K pixel requirement means that everything will fall into the degraded-image category.

(A lot of this OPM stuff seems to come straight from the twilight zone. It's normal to have error codes indicating that there was a disk error or that a network packet got garbled, but I'm sure Windows Vista must be the first OS in history to have error codes for things like ?display quality too high?).

There's plenty more. I'll post more after you've read that.

I still don't really understand it, but it sounds wildly stupid to buy all this expensive HD stuff and not be able to achieve that quality on your screen... wtf!?

I wonder what the impetus is for microsoft to do this. As somebody else said, William doesn't need hollywood... what does he have to gain?

well, Microsoft have tried so goddamn hard to stamp out music/video piracy they have basically blocked all content, legal or not.

I'm glad I get it.

Penguinboy: Not all content, but at least good image quality. That's what I got from those few excerpts, anyway.

all HD content, anyway.
"the hardware needs to be secure" apparently...

So why can't we clone windows? If we can clone processors and ram chips, why not OSs?

Because Windows runs on it's own core, not a previously existing one (iirc). Stuff like OS X and Linux and all the other distros run under Unix. Windows came out of DOS, while 2000, XP and I'm pretty sure Vista run under Windows NT.

Well that's gay. If someone else developed an alternative OS, William would have to behave more... Anti-trust squad turn on 1!

I'm not bashing Vista to "look cool", I'm bashing Vista because it really IS going to make things harder for consumers and developers alike. Developing hardware and drivers that work with Vista will prove a bit more difficult for manafacturers, and as a result the products will cost more, which as a result will hurt consumers, and as a further result hurting the manafacturers as their sales drop when people cannot afford their hardware. This will leave the industry in a mess.

@Rowleybob: People have cloned Windows, with a small amount of success. Check out ReactOS. I know of a couple of other similar projects in the works that will be DX9 capable.

@Penguinboy: The Doom III engine doesn't utilize a single Direct X function, it uses OpenGL, hence why native MacOSX, BSD and Linux binaries exist (infact both the Quake III and Doom III engines were native to Unix in the first place and were ported to Windows, as far as I know anyway).

@Ant: Linux != Unix. Linux is a clone of Unix, incorporating features from both SysV Unix and BSD Unix. OSX is primarily based on a small Unix-like microkernel called Mach (the name has nothing to do with Mac, just a coincidence) and has alot of code taken from FreeBSD 5 too. Windows 95/98/ME (and even 3.1) are all really nothing more than libraries and shells for DOS (much like X11 and enviroments running under it are "shells" for Unix-like systems). However, Windows NT 3.5 (Windows 3.1 with an NT kernel)/NT 4 (Windows 95 with an NT kernel)/2000/XP/2003/Vista are all based on Windows NT.

Vista is disappointment. Back in it's early days when everyone referred to it as Longhorn, it really looked rather promising, with it's innovative WinFS and supposedly brand new architecture, but it just turned out to be yet another rehash of Windows NT with some DRM bolted on (infact, Vista is also known as Windows NT 5.3, XP and 2003 being 5.1 and 5.2 respectively).

m0p: So I was sorta right.

m0p: Damn!!

yeah, i realized that d3 is openGL after i posted that, but it isnt that big of a deal cus i was just making an example.

also, wasnt unix a commercial OS? you had to pay for it, right?

speaking of openGL, whats its equivalent of dx10? is there one? i see more developers using openGL, if there is a similar version to dx10, so it can be played in XP.

The latest release of OpenGL is version 2.1, released August 2006.

what kind of features does it have? can it match dx10?

too late.

Not all content, but at least good image quality. That's what I got from those few excerpts, anyway.

No, they actually termed it all "premium" content, rather than "high-definition". They want to be the Apple of the video-download world.

Vista is disappointment. Back in it's early days when everyone referred to it as Longhorn, it really looked rather promising, with it's innovative WinFS and supposedly brand new architecture, but it just turned out to be yet another rehash of Windows NT with some DRM bolted on (infact, Vista is also known as Windows NT 5.3, XP and 2003 being 5.1 and 5.2 respectively).

Agreed. Somehow they managed to drop every interesting feature and take twice as long to make it.

I think SysV was commercial (it was certainly closed source), but I know that all of it's modern derivatives are certainly both closed source and commercial. BSD was, is and always will be open source and completely free.