An expert exposition of Vista DRM (Digital Rights Management) examines not only the intrusive spyware Microsoft has the right to install on your Vista system, it also hints at the perfidious plan MS might be hatching to control the pipeline for all kinds of content including software and applications. Very scary indeed!
Not only does Vista introduce few new features as many announced “improvements” had to be abandoned for time concerns and MS incompetence, it also drains your Notebook battery and will require a system update for most users to make use of the shiny new features.
While user’s have hardly any benefits besides eye-candy, Microsoft benefits a great deal, especially in the areas of piracy protection and digital rights management. The latter prescribe a rigorous process of driver evaluation and certificate checking to ensure that no digital content is ever present on a computer system in unencrypted form. These techniques can later be expanded to other kinds of content such as music, DVD movies, and eventually application software. Your purchased software will only run if Microsoft says it’s ok.
Vista is like a behemoth not only for users but also for developers. The learning curve has been collapsing over many with of them with .NET and Visual Studio in three iterations, all kinds of XML techniques and countless technology offerings and server components introduced over the last fiver years. And now Win32 is thrown out in favour of .NET 3.0 and WCF, WWF and WPF introducing a brand new programming paradigm. No wonder there is a groundswell of defection from the Microsoft platform (.NET) to open source software and especially Ruby on Rails for web development. Even Microsoft guru Mike Gunderloy has left to get himself a fresh cup.
Feb 05
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