Sunday, January 21, 2007

Vista Team Responds to "Longest Suicide Note Ever Written"

Posted yesterday, a blog entry by Windows Vista Team member Nick White appears to address sidestep some of the concerns raised in the previously published paper "Longest Suicide Note Ever Written." Here's a piece of the entry:

Windows Vista includes content protection infrastructure specifically designed to help ensure that protected commercial audiovisual content, such as newly released HD-DVD or Blu-Ray discs, can be enjoyed on Windows Vista PCs. In many cases this content has policies associated with its use that must be enforced by playback devices. The policies associated with such content are applicable to all types of devices including Windows Vista PCs, computers running non-Windows operating systems, and standalone consumer electronics devices such as DVD players.

Now, computers can play DVDs, but it is upsetting to think that this technology can reduce my computer to the functionality of a standalone DVD player. The paper goes on to answer twenty questions regarding DRM and media playback in Windows Vista. While the questions do directly relate to concerns brought up in the previous paper, often the answers sidestep the issue at hand completely. It is a good read nonetheless.

(via somethingawful)

1 comment:

Teque5 said...

The best are the user comments at the end of this Vista Digital Restrictions Malware blab. My favorite is someone responding to the downgrade in video output when viewing HD-DVD/Blu-Ray:

"In the case of HD optical media formats such as HD-DVD and Blu-Ray, the constraint requirement is 520K pixels per frame (i.e., roughly 960x540), which is still higher than the native resolution of content distributed in the DVD-Video format. We feel that this is still yields a great user experience, even when using a high definition screen."

YUM! I LOVE to get less than what I paid for, simply because I don't want my computer and monitor to pay licenses to Intel for a technology that is so weak (and misplaced) it is bordering on useless.
-r3m0t