Romanian security researcher cracks Microsoft Windows Vista DRM!
And the cheer went up: Huzzah!
There is very little reason for you to “upgrade” (sick euphemism, at best) to Vista since it is defective by design. However, in interesting news, the upcoming DRM — which prevents you from doing many tasks — has been cracked by a Romanian.
Prepare yourself now; you can expect to see more posts about why Vista is bad for you.
January 30th, 2007 at 12:37 pm
I wasn’t going to upgrade my Ubuntu to Vista anyway. :p
Microsoft seems to have an interesting way of shooting themselves in the foot. Not that they should worry too much though. Now that Vista is on the shelves, Windows XP will be increasingly hard to find and it will disappear completely at some point. There will be no choice for new users. Plus, it doesn’t look like MS will backport new versions of DirectX to XP, so gamers will probably have to take the plunge too.
January 30th, 2007 at 11:54 pm
You sure about that? I mean… with Windows Vista you get all the fancy new graphics stuff that OS X has been doing for over 5 years and Ubuntu’s been kinda doing for a couple years.
So what if Windows is hopelessly behind? At least they prevent you from watching movies. Plus the prevent you from listening to music. And let’s not forget the hardware issues…
You’re right that Vista will slowly catch on with buyers who don’t care what’s on TV or whether they have clean underwear on. When dorkboy buys his latest expensive machine from Compuworld, Vista already comes on it and kinda works. So, why bother. Meh.
However, I imagine a large number of smart people are going to migrate away. We already see that trend happening everywhere in the world except the US and South Korea. People, organizations, businesses, and entire governments are moving to a friendly linux, such as the I’m-still-happy-with-it Ubuntu.
For the gamers, they need to get some priorities. There, I’ve said it.
January 31st, 2007 at 12:20 am
Smart people are a minority. People use the OS that came with the computer (and that’s Windows) or the OS some cousin installed for them (again, very likely to be Windows). Sites like Slashdot or digg are full of Apple and Linux fans (or fanboys?), but that doesn’t mean much. If you’re interested in Apple you’re probably going to read blogs about Apple, you will talk to your friends about Apple etc. Suddenly it seems that everybody and their mother is using Apple. But sadly, Apple has a 3% market share or something like that. Most of the people never heard of the alternatives or they’ve heard that one of them is expensive and the other one only nerds can use.
January 31st, 2007 at 1:30 am
Would you agree it would be a “watershed event” if Microsoft Windows had only 80% of desktops in the next 5 years? Project the impact of that in 10 years, when even the stupid people see that “it’s okay to run Linux and everything just works.”
The intelligent people are jumping ship. It’s all around us.
January 31st, 2007 at 2:23 am
A drop to 80% would be groundshaking. That doesn’t mean it will happen.
Windows was always 10 steps behind, but it was more popular than Mac OS. Windows 3.1 was a joke compared to the contemporary versions of Mac OS or NEXTSTEP. But Microsoft made it look like it was just an interim version and that they were working on something much better than anyone else had: the illusive “Cairo” that never came about. They always compared what the competition already had with their plans for the future. They never compared Mac OS X (released 2001) with Windows XP (released 2001). They compared it with Longhorn that was… just around the corner. Longhorn was supposed to be written from scratch for better security (of course they changed their mind along the way and used the legacy Windows 2003 Server code), a new revolutionary file system (WinFS – they ditched that too) so it was worth the wait. And people fell for it, as always.
Also, they’re masters at locking people in. They invented CSS, but when everyone else implemented it, they created a “de-facto standard” with Internet Explorer. They sypported E4X (they had 3 people in the committee, all of them voted “Yes”), but they didn’t implement it in IE7. When everyone else standardized ODF (they were in that committee too, btw), they decided to create their own crappy XML format for Office (oh, and btw, the format changed with every Office release). They patent everything to make it as hard as possible for other computers to interact with Windows computers. There are dozens of examples.
They are masters of FUD. If you don’t play it their way, you might get in trouble. The Linux kernel infringes on their intellectual property. Of course they don’t point to a single line of code or a patent they own. They know that any infringing code would disappear in a matter of hours. Linux is not supported. Like any corporate user ever called Microsoft for support. Linux has a higher total cost of ownership. Etc etc etc. You tend to get confused when the MS people start to talk, and that’s exactly what they want.
January 31st, 2007 at 12:15 pm
Now, I was never hacking a Tandy onto 300-baud modems or punching assembly cards, but I’ve been around the unstoppable Microsoft machine long enough to realize there have been several failed attempts at dethroning the king. I also know the attempts will keep coming. I also know one of them (or more likely a combination of them) will work.
Yes, it will be the vast army of unruly descendants of the wild-eyed firebrand Richard Stallman, who has only just now arrived at the cusp of readiness. Taken as a whole, this loosely-aligned mob are now the unstoppable force riding over the horizon and into this dark valley. They will be the ultimate victors when the long-term shakeout is done.
But they don’t fight alone. In the tradition of Marc Andressen’s and James Gosling’s efforts to grab the brass ring of capitalism, the cross-platform platform continues to make Microsoft less relevant. DotNet will not suffice as lifejacket to keep Windows alive on the desktop. Between AJAXy technologies developed at corporations far and wide and single mega-heavyweights like Adobe (Flex), there is an increasing awareness that Microsoft is probably never going to have another major desktop operating system release. Period.
On that front, Vista will most likely be their last big hurrah. It’s all around us.
January 31st, 2007 at 2:09 pm
Of course they won’t be around forever. Me and my girlfriend, we have a bone to pick with Microsoft, especially because of IE. And we were talking one night trying to imagine what could bring about their doom. We contemplated everything from subtle market shifts to terrorist attacks against their headquarters. :D They have so much money that they could make selling mouses their main business and still survive. But I don’t think it will come to that. I think their grip on the market is too strong at the moment. I think their undoing is more likely to come from their shareholders rather than from the users jumping ship. If the shareholders lose faith in the management and decide to pull their money… Money is the only thing Microsoft has right now (although they try to make it look like they have a vision, they innovate etc).
February 3rd, 2007 at 6:55 pm
my next computer will definitely be an apple….what is disturbing is that all of the main computer manufacturers automatically install and bundle microsoft products, plus think of all of the corporations and/or numerous businesses across the globe that subscribe to this software because it is the generic one that most employees know to use….one of my main bones to pick is that there are literally websites that refuse to operate on any other browser but i.e. …now what kind of mentality is that??
February 8th, 2007 at 10:41 am
I am not going to make an immediate upgrade unless the software is reliable from my own prospective.
February 18th, 2007 at 12:21 pm
I have heard of this, but when it comes expiration, the sytem won’t function right?