Hasta la Vista, Part II. More ammunition to fire at M$…

Posted on February 13, 2007
Filed Under Rants, Techie stuff

Schneier on Security: DRM in Windows Vista

Quite an interesting discussion here. Some of the comments fail to realise that Microsoft has a virtual monopoly, not because its being propped up by legislation but because; a) Macs are too expensive b) Linux is a dark art, and c) not enough people know of the existence of either.

A) The first point is a valid one, as I’m sure you will agree. Mac hardware (which are the only products which will run Macs OS) is prohibitively expensive. While you can get an entry level PC for around about £300 a similar mac (17 inch iMac) will set you back twice that. If Apple were to get their act together and develope their next OS to run on PCs as well as Macs I’m sure they could give Microsoft a real run for their money. Especially if they left out all the nasty DRM stuff you’re lumbered with. This shouldn’t be beyond them as Macs already use Intel processors.
B) The second point is unfortunately also valid. Having recently upgraded my home media server to Ubuntu I can vouch for the fact that Linux is most definitely a dark art. To get the system running just the way you want it you need to use the command line, and the command line in Linux is basically Unix. Without knowing the correct incantations, and entering them without errors, you can’t add Hard Drives, Install some software, or adjust some settings. Ubuntu states that its goal is to “Be Linux for Human Beings” and its almost there. If you don’t want to change anything about the hardware of your machine or install esoteric software Ubuntu is absolutely fine. The GUI (Gnome) is logical and reasonably attractive (though you can change the GUI to one of the many that are available)
C) This point is the clincher. Every off the shelf PC that you can buy comes with a copy of Windows. Go into a branch of Comet or Currys (or your local equivalent) and you will find that you are not able to buy a blank PC. When your average non-geek hears PC they automatically think ‘Windows’. All the businesses I’ve worked for have used Windows and Microsoft offers cut price licenses for educational establishments such as schools and colleges. This means that potentially people are exposed to the Windows environment from the moment they start school until the moment they retire. The alternatives are out there but very few people know about them because of this. Is this uncompetitive? It certainly smacks of it.

There are points in the article that I take issue with but all in all Mr. Schneier hits the nail right on the head. Until Microsoft’s stranglehold of the PC market is challenged it may as well have a true monopoly.

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Comments

4 Responses to “Hasta la Vista, Part II. More ammunition to fire at M$…”

mike (Who am I?) on February 13th, 2007 8:52 pm
B)
Excuse me Sir, this is bullsh*t.
Of course there is the possibilty to use commandline tools, this is the way if you want to get things done fast.
But not one example in your argumentation is valid.

- If you want to use a mass storage device, simply plug it in.
An icon will immediately appear on your desktop. Can Windows do that? No.
Windows doesn’t even support ANY next-generation filesystem.

- To install software, double click on the package or use Synaptic. Can Windows do that? No, in fact installing software under Windows is a PITA, because you have to install every program seperate, one after another, together with stupid question, serial numbers etc.
You can’t even update your installed software from a central point, you have to do it one by one. Uninstalling programs often leaves things behind.

- If you want it complicated, use gconf-editor, you will be happy to hear that it looks quite similar to RegEdit, a program you might love.

Regards
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mandrill (Who am I?) on February 14th, 2007 12:42 am
There’s no need to be so aggressive.

I am only relaying my experience with Ubuntu over the past few days there are things about it that I love, and things about it that I could grow to love, but that would put off the average PC buyer who goes along to PC world (or wherever) and buys an off the shelf machine. As a default, Ubuntu does not give root privileges to the desktop which made mounting and chmodding the various drives available to me a bit of a hassle. something I can live with but which people to whom their PC is just another magical technological box would not find quite so endearing. Admittedly there were some fairly esoteric things I was trying to do with my machine (getting it to read and write to NTFS partitions, networking it with a Windows machine, installing software that isn’t available in any of the repositories and the like) that gave me the impression that doing anything in Linux was difficult and would baffle less computer minded souls. Having only recently entered the world of Linux I can only use ignorance as an excuse if I got it wrong.
The problem, I think, is that people want their PCs to be like their DVD players, i.e. a box that sits in the corner and does what they want it to with the minimum of fuss. At the moment there are only two sources of that kind of PC experience and I’m sorry but I don’t think Linux (of any flavour) is quite there yet. Mac and Windows are consumer based companies who have to give the customer what they want or they go out of business and for those who don’t have money to throw away Macs are far too expensive and they’ve probably never even heard of Linux. Linux is not market driven, has so many variations it confuses even me sometimes, and doesn’t come pre-packaged on any off the shelf PC that I’ve seen in a major retailer. That was the point I was trying to make. If it came across that I was having a go at Linux that was not my intention. I was merely voicing my view of some of the drawbacks that Linux has compared to Windows.
All your points are valid, software installation and updating in Ubuntu is a joy (I’ve set mine to do it automatically on a weekly basis, I don’t even have to think about it any more), I may have been having problems with my HDDs because they were NTFS (I could see them with fdisk but until I mounted them they didn’t appear on my desktop.) I’m sure that most of the difficulties I had (less than with trying to network two windows machines, I might add) came from the fact that I was working in an unfamiliar OS and was under the (false) impression that Linux must be complicated.
From your last point I get the feeling that you may have misread my intention completely, if you haven’t read Part I I would reccomend it, you may get a better Idea of where I’m coming from. If not I’ll reiterate it here: I hate windows, can’t stand it, but I love games. Emulation will never be satisfactory so I’m stuck with it. If all the games I wanted to play were available for linux I’d switch in an instant, as it is I’ll always have a windows box sitting under my desk.
Regards,
M
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Tom Donald (Who am I?) on February 15th, 2007 11:14 pm
In the world of windows, “security” and “protection” are words used about mandatory restriction on the operation of the computer in the interest of big business. Something very similar is true about life in general in the UK. The convergence of these processes will be an even more mind-bogglingly miserable land full of super-documented drones watching garbage on 96inch TVs. I cannae wait…
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mandrill (Who am I?) on February 16th, 2007 9:52 am
Since I wrote the above post I’ve discovered that older games which run under Windows XP may take a performance hit when running under Vista. this is due to DirectX 10 having to emulate DirectX 9 to run them. This is just not acceptable. Because of all the monitoring crap and other resource heavy processes which run all the time in Vista a PC with the same specs running XP will actually run faster than one running Vista. I’m beginning to get the distinct feeling that Microsoft have shot themselves in the foot with this one. I’ll be on the lookout for benchmark comparisons between XP games on Vista and XP games on linux. If Linux looks like being even slightly better than Vista then M$ will never be getting my custom again.
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