Posted on 02/21/2007 7:53:07 PM PST by ShawTaylor
A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection
While ATi might be slightly better in the drive department than nVidia at the moment; they're not exactly happy with vista. In fact, I think you'd be hard pressed to find any manufactures that are happy about the fact that they are being forced to have engineering design decisions made by those technical geniuses in hollywood.
As for over the air HD,, when they finally get the broadcast flag forced down your throat, you're gonna have a real expensive SD PVR there.
2000 was an excellent OS but lacked the same rich, Object Oriented base for programmers to plug into. With the release of SP2, XP became extremely strong and stable. As the OS has matured, hardware producers became more and more savvy about how to manipulate XP to very high, very stable levels.
People who complained about XP being a resource hog were simply not educated enough to see the benefits of the OS. Vista is the opposite: no one who's serious about computers cares about the resources Vista uses...for a thousand bucks you can built a system that will eat Vista alive....it's the other aspects of the OS that is the problem.
Vista, is clearly a money-grab and MS has not substantially improved the OS over XP. They were caught attempting to manipulate the license agreement in such a way as to make it impossible for advanced users to substantially upgrade theyr machines while keeping the same copy of the OS. The original license agreement stated that Vista could only be installed on one machine....period. Swap out your motherboard and guess what? You've got a "new computer" according to the hardware ID number, and you'd have to buy a new copy of Vista.
Now they've announced that DirectX will not be ported to XP. There's absolutely no programming reason for this. They're doing this to force gamers to upgrade. This is a variation on what I refer to as "The Great ADO Scam" that forced businesses to move from Office 97 to 2000 and upgrade any SQL Servers and their connection licenses. All MS did was kill DAO, mix it up a little and release it as ADO......while not making it backward compatible.
They've had to drop the majority of improvements they'd originally planned for Vista because they weren't able to effectively develop them.
Furthermore, in the interest of DRM, they're forcing hardware vendors to dumb down and slow the hardware.....Not to improve the user experience mind you, but to improve the protections on media content.
I could go on but, I sort of doubt you actually understand half of what I'm saying.
except that XP can only support 3GB ram total. Vista will support 4GB. I love the sidebar feature on Vista. Having the weather, news, and time and date on my desktop is a handy feature.
Imagine a game publisher having to write two versions of it's game for the winders platform.
I can't imagine they're too pleased with that prospect.
Upgraded security features. Vista ultimate combines all the features of Vista Business and Vista Home Premium. You get remote desktopping and the multimedia features. Great for college students.
" If your current computer is working well, XP offers no compelling reason to replace it."
THIS is the important phrase ... and it will hold for Vista also.
Do people here really think that Microsoft marketing dosen't know this ?
"Win98 to XP was a huge improvement. XP to Vista?"
98 to XP was a huge improvement becasue there was one and a half OSs between them (ME and 2000).
I closer analogy would be ME or 2000 to Vista, not XP to Vista.
Lyons is a known MS-Bot and anti-anything-that-isn't-Microsoft. His writings on the subject of the SCO v. IBM and SCO v. Novell writings are similar hack jobs - "open source is lame, SCO and Microsoft is the future"
Except that figure for the installed base is wrong.
If Apple Mac's represent 1.6% of the entire installed base of personal computers, that would be 1.6% of 891.5 million which is only 14.26 million. Every current report puts the number of OS X Macs somewhere between 22,000,000 and 23,000,000... or 2.46%. - 2.57%.
However, scientific surveys of computer users done by Consumers (Union) Reports (2005) and Popular Science (2006) put the number of Mac users in the US at between 16,000,000 and 18,000,000. Since those surveys were made, Apple sold around 9,500,000 OS X Macs. Allowing for attrition and retirement of older Macs, although many of them are still operational and are just handed down, the 23,000,000 figure may actually be low.
The Software Publishers Association, in early 2006, estimated that 16% of computer users in the United States are on Macintoshes. Mid 2006 data from another industry source, the Software and Information Industry Association, reports that 18% of all software sold is Macintosh Software (they also report that Mac users buy 30% more software than their Windows using cousins.).
This month's WebApplications.com's report shows that the in use market share of Mac OS X computers making hits on their surveyed world wide websites (heavily PC oriented) topped 6.2% in January 2007. It is interesting to note that LINUX was used by only .35% of the computers hitting their sites.
In addition, Gartner reported that in the third quarter of 2006 Apple Macs hit 6.2% market share of all computers sold in the United States (IDG, which includes servers in their totals, reported Apple's share at 5.8%). In the 4th Quarter of 2006, Apple's worldwide sales market share topped 3%.
The question also needs to be asked: how many of the installed PCs in that 891.5 million figure are dedicated application, non-consumer computers such as servers, point-of-sale cash registers, control computers for CAM, etc.? How many are actually being used by people, consumers?
I'm a gamer not a programmer so I can't say much technical but here's a quick overview I googled up.
http://www.driverheaven.net/articles/dx10/
If I recall correctly, one year after the release of WindowsXP, pundits were decrying the fact that fewer than 21% of Windows users had switched from their previous Windows versions... and that 21% included sales of new computers. In the enterprise it was fewer than 6%. I suspect we will see the same pattern with Vista.
Viruses have propagated to infect the only 12,000 vulnerable clients over the Internet. If 12,000 is critical mass, then over 25 million is definitely above critical mass.
XP sucked at launch, too. It was fairly usable at SP1 unless you were doing wireless, and pretty stable by SP2. Don't expect Vista to be any decent until at least SP1.
Microsoft has never, ever, innovated. They have commandeered ideas and successfully implemented them. I do give Microsoft credit for one thing that revolutionized the computer industry. They are street fighters, and broke the good old boy system that was common among computer firms. Companies like IBM that dominated the computer industry were very profitable and had no motivation to upset the high profit margin business model. They were very arrogant, and had no desire to see computers become a commodity product, because it would mean lower profit margins.
MS pushed the envelope, and changed a lot of things.
There were approximately 12,000 vulnerable, unpatched BlackICE protected Windows PCs in the entire world, spread out in over 27 countries, when the Witty Worm was written to exploit an already patched BlackICE vulnerability. Within 45 minutes of the Witty Worm's release into the wild, every single one of the vulnerable Windows PCs was infected.
There are at least 22,000,000 OS X based Macs in the world. That's 1,833 times the number of BlackICE firewalled computers targeted by the Witty Worm. The vast majority of the of those Macs are naked, unprotected from any virus or worm that could infect them, yet it is now going on SIX YEARS in the wild without even one self-transimittable, self-replicating malware being found in the wild.
There must be some other reason for the Macs seeming invulnerability to malware other than Security-by-Obscurity.
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