[Janos]

karajorma the only difference is one is built on networks and is no different anywhere else. btw i never said nt so what ever that was about hope you got a reason to start that.

the only major leap in advancements ive seen from windows is dos to 3.1 or 3.11 . then you got 3.1 to 95 and from there to vista is basically just a few added files rereleased and is expensive. unless i see something completly different from windows like open source, then its just a few more files and im not even contemplating vista until the price lowers significantally, given take 2 years to slash atleast quid/dollars100 off.

Well well well.

[Taristin]

Ehh. It isnt worth arguing with him. He's uninformed, but highly opinionated on almost every subject.

[Falcon]

dell is **** because they use funny wires for thier machines, thats why dell wont let you repair it and also why you cant put stuff in that don't belong in a Dell machine. so either way its a massive money making scheme.

I was able to put in a new power supply and a new video card in a Dell system. Even though I had some difficulty with the power supply, (Dell puts wires in the weirdest places.) I got it in eventually.

[achtung]

I dare you to try replacing a Dell mobo with an Asus.

[Falcon]

I dare you to try replacing a Dell mobo with an Asus.

I would never submit a mobo to that torture. I even feel bad for putting that video card and power supply in.

[Descenterace]

As for the application of DRM to gamaing equipment, I do not see where this performance drop comes from, as games are not generated from DRM protected video (DRM in games comes from a check done at startup.).

Really? So you haven't heard about how Vista ensures that all the hardware is what it claims to be and no one's trying to reverse-engineer anything to rip content out of a supposedly secure content path?

It polls the hardware. It runs checks every 30ms. Whether or not premium content is running. Not only that, every time a driver returns a strange result or a piece of hardware glitches, the OS sets a 'tilt bit' to indicate that something may be insecure. Once the tilt bits reach a threshold, the machine reboots.
Given that almost all hardware misbehaves occasionally (the average stick of RAM has a huge amount of redundancy in it to cope with problems caused by, eg. background radiation) and hardware is also affected by its environment (not everyone runs their PC in an air-conditioned clean room) this will make for an extremely unstable OS. One driver from a cheapskate vendor is all it takes, and mainboard drivers are rarely from anything but the lowest bidder.

Finally, if no one produces DRM-enabled hardware, then the movie industry will be trying to sell premium content that doesn't run on anything, ergo it won't sell (at least not to PC users; there'll still be HDDVD players connected to TVs of course). This won't hurt the hardware vendors, because people don't just buy PCs to watch movies.

It's the ones pushing DRM who'd get hurt by it. If they're making demands of the industry, they might want to consider that there is no money in DRM for those who make PC hardware.

[aldo_14]

On the subject of tilt bits; http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/12/27/windows_drm_monstered/

Copy-protection features in Windows Vista make the operating system more bloated while giving few benefits to end users, according to a new security paper.

Peter Gutmann, a medical imaging specialist, argues in the paper that Microsoft's cumbersome approach to DRM is doomed to fail and will only succeed in pushing users towards buying faster hardware to cope with degraded performance, effectively imposing collateral damage on the rest of the industry.

Many of the criticisms Gutmann makes will be familiar to those who have followed the development of Vista's copyright protection features however his hard-hitting prose style and warning that the Vista Content Protection specs could "very well constitute the longest suicide note in history" has reinvigorated the debate.

Gutmann argues, for example, that in order lock down High Definition content, Vista limits the number of connectivity options to users. 'Windows Vista includes an extensive reworking of core OS elements in order to provide content protection for so-called "premium content", typically HD data from Blu-Ray and HD-DVD sources. Providing this protection incurs considerable costs in terms of system performance, system stability, technical support overhead, and hardware and software cost. These issues affect not only users of Vista but the entire PC industry, since the effects of the protection measures extend to cover all hardware and software that will ever come into contact with Vista, even if it's not used directly with Vista (for example hardware in a Macintosh computer or on a Linux server)," Gutmann writes in an abstract to his paper here.

Microsoft is risking annoying its customer base and users in a bid to corner the market for home distribution of premium content.

Gutmann argues that hackers will find it just as easy to bypass the content protection mechanisms of Vista as they have with other versions of the OS.

These ultimately doomed efforts will lead to a more expensive and less functional operating system for users, he argues. ®

(http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html)

Decreased System Reliability

    “Drivers must be extra-robust. Requires additional driver development to isolate and protect sensitive code paths” — ATI.

Vista's content protection requires that devices (hardware and software drivers) set so-called “tilt bits” if they detect anything unusual. For example if there are unusual voltage fluctuations, maybe some jitter on bus signals, a slightly funny return code from a function call, a device register that doesn't contain quite the value that was expected, or anything similar, a tilt bit gets set. Such occurrences aren't too uncommon in a typical computer. For example starting up or plugging in a bus-powered device may cause a small glitch in power supply voltages, or drivers may not quite manage device state as precisely as they think. Previously this was no problem — the system was designed with a bit of resilience, and things will function as normal. In other words small variances in performance are a normal part of system functioning. Furthermore, the degree of variance can differ widely across systems, with some handling large changes in system parameters and others only small ones. One very obvious way to observe this is what happens when a bunch of PCs get hit by a momentary power outage. Effects will vary from powering down, to various types of crash, to nothing at all, all triggered by exactly the same external event.

With the introduction of tilt bits, all of this designed-in resilience is gone. Every little (normally unnoticeable) glitch is suddenly surfaced because it could be a sign of a hack attack, with the required reaction being that (from the spec) “Windows Vista will initiate a full reset of the graphics subsystem, so everything will restart”. According to Microsoft this will only take a few seconds and will only affect the graphics subsystem (so it's not a complete restart of Vista), but the true impact of this mechanism remains to be seen. In addition even if it's relatively quick, systems with high availability requirements probably won't appreciate the overhead of periodic soft-reboots of the graphics subsystem. So the effect that these tilt bits will have on system reliability should require no further explanation.

Content-protection “features” like tilt bits also have worrying denial-of-service (DoS) implications. It's probably a good thing that modern malware is created by programmers with the commercial interests of the phishing and spam industries in mind rather than just creating as much havoc as possible. With the number of easily-accessible grenade pins that Vista's content protection provides, any piece of malware that decides to pull a few of them will cause considerable damage. The homeland security implications of this seem quite serious, since a tiny, easily-hidden piece of malware would be enough to render a machine unusably unstable, while the very nature of Vista's content protection would make it almost impossible to determine why the denial-of-service is occurring. Furthermore, the malware authors, who are taking advantage of “content-protection” features, could claim protection under the DMCA against any attempts to reverse-engineer or disable the content-protection “features” that they're abusing.

Going beyond deliberate denial-of-service attacks, it's possible to imagine all sorts of scenarios in which the tilt bits end up biting users. Consider a warship operating in a combat zone and equipped with Vista PCs for management of the vessel's critical functions which does nothing more wrong that to suffer a severe jolt from a near miss, scrambling the bus just enough to activate the tilt bits (without causing any other real damage). In one infamous incident in September 1997, Windows NT managed to disable the Aegis missile cruiser USS Yorktown (“NT Leaves Navy 'Smart Ship' dead in the water”, Government Computer News, 13 July 1998). Now Windows Vista can do the same thing via a by-design feature of the OS [Note H]. This issue, unless it can be clearly resolved, would make the use of Vista PCs unacceptable for any applications that have any hint of unusual environmental conditions such as high altitude, environmental variations, shock, and so on.

Some contributors have commented that they can't see the revocation system ever being used because the consumer backlash would be too enormous, but then the legal backlash from not going ahead could be equally extreme. The only real indication that we have for how committed Microsoft really are to this is the amazing speed with which Microsoft released a patch for the WMDRM (Windows Media DRM) vulnerability, which they rushed out at a speed that even the most virulent worm never produced. This would seem to indicate that they're pretty serious about this, since they prioritised it above any conventional non-DRM-related security problem.

[Turnsky]

all i have to say about this is..

"So?"

i mean, it's all good and fine to scream "microsoft is the Day-vuhl!", but it doesn't change the fact that a LOT of people use microsoft products, a lot of people's first computer experiences are using microsoft products (DOS 5.20 for me). some people are used to them.

but, i digress, i'll leave you OS fanboys to your tinfoil hat construction. 

[aldo_14]

all i have to say about this is..

"So?"

i mean, it's all good and fine to scream "microsoft is the Day-vuhl!", but it doesn't change the fact that a LOT of people use microsoft products, a lot of people's first computer experiences are using microsoft products (DOS 5.20 for me). some people are used to them.

but, i digress, i'll leave you OS fanboys to your tinfoil hat construction. 

If one company has a solid monopoly, does that mean we don't have the right to expect fair treatment and a good product?

[Janos]

all i have to say about this is..

"So?"

i mean, it's all good and fine to scream "microsoft is the Day-vuhl!", but it doesn't change the fact that a LOT of people use microsoft products, a lot of people's first computer experiences are using microsoft products (DOS 5.20 for me). some people are used to them.

but, i digress, i'll leave you OS fanboys to your tinfoil hat construction. 

If one company has a solid monopoly, does that mean we don't have the right to expect fair treatment and a good product?

Well is Microsoft a monopoly then?
They have a lot of competition from OS and open-source software and are competing with them as the OP article mentions, I'd think that the fact that they seriously think how to squash competition says quite a lot about their alleged monopoly status (were they a monopoly they would simply buy the competition or then use their monopoly status to smash them in price race). The fact that MS systems just happen to be default opsystems in huge percent of sold computers says nothing about whether or not they are a monopoly. They are the leading software producer, yeah, but that doesn't mean they're a monopoly either. If they were, we wouldn't have any other commercial OSes and a lot of software would suck.

Capitalism is a tough business and companies will use any and all means to increase their profit. That's why we have regulating agencies and organizations that keep the large companies from gaining dictatorial position in market. Of course companies will use illegal means if the gains exceed losses, and that's why we, again, have agencies to keep corporations from breaking the law. It does not mean that market should go 33%-33%-33%, it only means that everyone has a chance to compete, and this seems to be a thing many people with passionate hate towards some company often seem to forget.

Of course, a leading market share can and will distort fair competition, and it's not a thick black line in white paper, but many different shades of grey. Is including a superb text editor in OS "misusing the market lead"? Depends on the context.

[Ghostavo]

Buy the competition or price race against a freely developed software? 

Unless Microsoft starts paying people to use their software I don't see how that works.

[Taristin]

No, see his point is that, despite the title of this thread calling people who see reality "corporate shills", Microsoft isn't a monopoly by the very definition of monopoly. And the simple fact that they are trying to eliminate the competition in itself proves that there's competition that MS sees as a threat to it's profits.
A monopoly is like the electric company, or the water/gas companies, where you really have no choice as to what to use. Anyone who seriously hates Microsoft enough still has the option to use Linux in all of it's various flavors, or buy a mac. (Or, in the coming years, perhaps, buy Mac OSX/OS11 when it will likely run on almost any hardware.)

[aldo_14]

Whether or not MS is a monopoly depends largely on your definition of monopoly - yes, it's not the only seller, but I think it's arguably true to say that it controls the market, simply down to sheer financial muscle.  The option of getting Linux or OSX isn't really one you see much in Dixons, PC World et al.

[Descenterace]

If you want to run games at all reliably, Linux is not an option. Cedega and WINE are good these days but new games usually do not run on them, often for years.

DOS was very much forced down the customers' throats toward the beginning of its life. The IBM PC was a good platform that everyone wanted. Unfortunately, Microsoft got sole rights to provide an OS for it, which not only got them onto the first rung of the ladder but kicked everyone else off it too. Back then, there was no choice at all in OS for the PC platform, and no one minded because that's how things were back then: the OS was pretty much a part of the hardware platform. Over time that changed, but MS' dominant position has not.

MS is not a monopoly, but it was lucky enough to be practically unchallengable during the initial, vulnerable stage of its life by securing sole rights to an important part of the market. Back in the 1980s? Yes, MS probably was a monopoly back then, but that's because no one could really be bothered to compete in what was thought to be a niche market: operating systems for dinky little desktop computers.

They got there first, and everyone else has been catching up since. MS is pretty heavily entrenched, too; everyone's familiar with Windows. No new brands can gain momentum fast enough to topple them, so only the big names have any chance at all: Apple and Linux.
Linux has no hope of seriously appealing to the average customer until it can do everything Windows does, better. It's on the way, but Windows is advancing too (or moving, at any rate; whether or not it's advancing is a topic for debate).
Apple has a very good chance, but their focus always used to be hardware. That changed somewhat with the switch to x86, so maybe we'll see Macs seriously competing with Windows in the future. Thing is, if Windows can simply run on the same machine as Mac OS, dual boot is far simpler than emulating the Windows API on Mac OS...

To summarise: MS has an extremely strong market position, but it's history that put it there and the customers that keep it there. If you don't like it, remove Windows from your computers and live on Mac, Linux and BSD alone. No one is required to use Windows; anything it can do, Linux/Mac can also do, but not necessarily as easily/cheaply.

[Janos]

No, see his point is that, despite the title of this thread calling people who see reality "corporate shills", Microsoft isn't a monopoly by the very definition of monopoly. And the simple fact that they are trying to eliminate the competition in itself proves that there's competition that MS sees as a threat to it's profits.

Yeah, that was pretty much what I was saying. If they weren't a monopoly the wouldn't have to even consider means to eliminate or minimize competition - their position in market should be sufficient, whatever it was. You could pricerace, outmarket, buy out, make it incompatible - the precise means are pretty irrelevant, only the fact that they are facing competition and that competition does affect their profits!
Competition is not only from direct customers. Most game manufactors, for example, consider Win/Mac as the only really useful platforms for games - not because of these systems' inherent compability but because most of their target audience uses these systems! This is a direct result of history, as Descenterance points out. MS does have financial muscle and is a market leader, but that is not enough to consider MS as a monopoly.

A monopoly is like the electric company, or the water/gas companies, where you really have no choice as to what to use. Anyone who seriously hates Microsoft enough still has the option to use Linux in all of it's various flavors, or buy a mac. (Or, in the coming years, perhaps, buy Mac OSX/OS11 when it will likely run on almost any hardware.)

Those are natural monopolies, which do not rise from twisted/manipulated market situation and misuse of power, but from the fact that in certain areas - electricity is the schoolbook example - only one company can manage the entire thing and competition tends to decrease the value and quality of service. If the nature of the business does not inherently exclude competition or make it extremely difficult, yet no competition exist due to articificial barriers, then we deal with schoolbook monopoly.

[Janos]

Whether or not MS is a monopoly depends largely on your definition of monopoly - yes, it's not the only seller, but I think it's arguably true to say that it controls the market, simply down to sheer financial muscle.  The option of getting Linux or OSX isn't really one you see much in Dixons, PC World et al.

Of course. MS is the leading company in operating systems. They have by far the biggest market share. Because of this, game companies and other software developers who are not aiming at niche markets tend to optimize their products to use the commonest operating system to reach the biggest potential audience, which in this case means developing their software for Windows platforms. In this case MS's dominant position means that they can pretty much dictate how other companies develop their systems, but this is only because right now MS happens to be a mean to distribute these third companies' products.

[Turnsky]

all i have to say about this is..

"So?"

i mean, it's all good and fine to scream "microsoft is the Day-vuhl!", but it doesn't change the fact that a LOT of people use microsoft products, a lot of people's first computer experiences are using microsoft products (DOS 5.20 for me). some people are used to them.

but, i digress, i'll leave you OS fanboys to your tinfoil hat construction. 

If one company has a solid monopoly, does that mean we don't have the right to expect fair treatment and a good product?

tell that to australian ipod users

the fact that yes, MS /is/ a monopoly, means that there's no other alternative operating system, so it's either "put up, or shut up".

Really all these other operating systems are too radically different from a platform standpoint to directly compete with microsoft's vice-like grip on the software market..

Linux is all good and fine, but in reality it doesn't compete directly with microsoft, have a linux build that runs windows programs and File Allocation systems natively without emulation, then you'd have a direct competator to the MS monopoly. 

[Kosh]

http://slashdot.org/articles/07/02/03/1524250.shtml


One a somewhat related note a bunch of MS private internal PMs and emails got published on the web.

[Descenterace]

Really all these other operating systems are too radically different from a platform standpoint to directly compete with microsoft's vice-like grip on the software market..

Linux is all good and fine, but in reality it doesn't compete directly with microsoft, have a linux build that runs windows programs and File Allocation systems natively without emulation, then you'd have a direct competator to the MS monopoly. 

But that is because the software vendors choose to support the Windows platform. They're not writing code for an independant standard that Windows happens to support; they're writing it specifically for Windows.

[Nuclear1]

http://slashdot.org/articles/07/02/03/1524250.shtml


One a somewhat related note a bunch of MS private internal PMs and emails got published on the web.

Hence the argument against why MS is a monopoly.

The fact that Macintosh can be that good is enough to draw away MS users, but MS's widespread reputation and presence alone guarantees it a strong fanbase.  If Macintosh were able to get their word out better, then MS would face some increasingly stiff competition.

Which is where the Mac users come in... if Macintosh can't spread the word, it's up to its users then.