A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection

Well. What to say about this? Reading this may be too geeky for many, but the upshot is that that Microsoft looks more and more to the Chief like being a wholly-owned subsidiary of Satanic Enterprises Un-ltd. Unfortunately, the lead header about “obscuring the view” is literally true!

Fortunately, one can get the gist from the “Executive Summary” and “Executive Executive Summary” which constitute a sort of abstract of the whole deal:

Executive Summary

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). This document analyses the cost involved in Vista’s content protection, and the collateral damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.

Executive Executive Summary

The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history.

May it be so!

As far as the Chief is concerned – he plans on avoiding VISTA now, and if possible, forever. Time to learn LINUX I guess.