Yet another great article from ArsTechnica covering Vista & Windows 7's use of DRM, and the unnecessary ruckus it has caused in the community (including by Martin):

The popular technology website Slashdot plumbed new depths on Tuesday with a post about the terrible DRM situation in Windows 7. Proving that some sites will publish just about anything as long as it's anti-Microsoft, the post enumerated the DRM restrictions that Windows 7 apparently inflicts on the honest and upstanding computer user.

What was claimed? Well, some guy decided that he wanted to crack his (legally purchased, no doubt) copy of Photoshop on his Windows 7 install. Windows 7 then sprung into life to break his crack, defend Photoshop's virtue against his unwelcome advances, protect a load of random DLLs from deletion, and open up the firewall so that Adobe could see that he was up to no good. Yup yup. To add insult to injury, Windows 7 then crippled the dude's sound card. Or something.

As is so often the case with this kind of story, the truth is more prosaic. The most likely reason that Photoshop broke is that either the crack didn't work or was the wrong version. Windows doesn't actually know what Photoshop is—it's just another application, no different from any other—and the operating system certainly doesn't contain special programming to detect and destroy Photoshop cracks.

Nor, for that matter, did Windows 7 magically open up the firewall. The Photoshop installer did that. And it only had permission to do that because the person installing the software gave it Administrator privileges so that it had access to the firewall configuration.

And the audio capabilities? They're largely determined by the sound drivers that are installed. The ones that ship on-disc are quite limited and don't offer any of the fancy sound processing or multiple outputs that custom drivers provide, but they do work. The particular complaint here is that Windows 7 lacks a "Stereo Mix" audio input. The "Stereo Mix" input allows the output of the sound card to be recorded directly, which is useful for capturing program output. But the reason there's no Stereo Mix is that the drivers the complainant was using doesn't support them. Third-party/custom drivers may continue to offer Stereo Mix, What-U-Hear, or any other equivalent; it's just the built-in ones that don't. They don't really do much at all, leaving scope for third parties to offer improvements on the base capabilities of the OS.
Windows 7's DRM

The more interesting question here is what DRM does Windows 7 have? Considering that Windows 7 is based on Windows Vista, it probably won't be altogether surprising to learn that Windows 7's DRM is more or less the same as Vista's. In practice, the most obvious restrictions—the ones most likely to affect people—are the ones protecting Windows itself: Product Activation and Windows Genuine Advantage. Neither of these are in any sense new, and in practice the majority of (legal) users will barely know that they exist.

Though activation caused a ruckus when XP was launched (with many fearing that it would all but end their ability to use their PCs in the way they wanted), in practice its restrictions have been quite inoffensive. Vista had its own DRM brouhaha, but this time the concern was not over the DRM protecting the operating system itself, but rather the DRM for protecting copyrighted sound and video.

It's true that Vista expanded on these capabilities. The Protected Video Path—designed to provide a secure way of playing back Blu-ray and HD DVD video—was new to Vista. When PVP is active, drivers must ensure that they keep the video safe. In particular, this means disabling high-resolution unencrypted outputs lest they be used to dump the decrypted, decoded video.

Particular complaints have been made about the polling that this requires; digital outputs must be checked every 30ms and analog ones every 150ms to ensure that no prohibited devices are attached. Although the system demands from this polling are negligible, it has nonetheless been blamed for Vista's relatively high system requirements.

On top of PVP, Vista includes a secure audio path called Protected User Mode Audio, or PUMA, which replaces XP's Secure Audio Path. The purpose of this is much the same as PVP; it is there to protect audio from being recorded or otherwise captured.

Though there was plenty of outcry over PUMA and PVP prior to Vista's launch, the story is once again a familiar one: most people don't notice. Little or no media actually demands the use of the protected paths, so on most users' systems, Windows never invokes them. Play back unprotected media on a Vista machine and the DRM subsystems simply don't get used.

All these Vista DRM features are found in Windows 7. But just as with Vista before it, the vast majority of users will never see the DRM in any practical sense; the features are there just in case Hollywood decides to make use of them. The overblown, unrealistic, and just plain made up horrors of DRM in Windows Vista never came to pass (in spite of the huge publicity that the Gutmann diatribe received), and so it will be with Windows 7.

When it comes to bashing Microsoft, it seems that any old canard will do; facts are strictly optional.

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And exactly what does this have to do with SETI@home number crunching?

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It's impact (or lack thereof) on CPU performance.

Alinator

Was that piece written by a third grader?

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IBA# 11465
http://imagesdesavions.com

And exactly what does this have to do with SETI@home number crunching?

Number Crunching has always been about computing, which including OS and hardware discussions. If it were limited strictly to "number crunching", half the posts wouldn't be here.

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Was that piece written by a third grader?

Is that all you can contribute? Attacking the author's skills/intelligence?

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Ain't technology wonderful! DRM? What's that?

I like listening to music while working & back in 2002, purchased Celine Dion's "A New Day Has Come" album - problem was that it wouldn't play on a computer. If I remember correctly, that caused a great stink & various cracks were suggested/applied. Why?

That album is now on my server with no problems whatsoever! How? Quite easy by using past technology. Connected stereo system to sound card, played album & recorded. (Edit) And it was done by Microsoft's Windows Plus Digitial Edition. I wonder why there was no Windows Plus pack for Vista?

DRM? What's that?

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I do have one case of DRM impeding on a normal user's request, but it is a minor one that had a simple remedy.

Friend of mine wanted to watch a DVD on an LCD projector, and Vista wouldn't let that happen because the projector is 7 years old and doesn't have HDCP. The remedy: I installed VLC media player and it worked fine.

Simple problem, simple solution. That's the only DRM issues I've run across in any version of Windows.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

The issue of DRM in Windows is an old one and was a major source of Longhorn-bashing.

And it IS an issue: "nothing that installing VLC couldn't solve"

But that's not especially DRM. When I get a new windows box at the office, I usually have to install, let's see, Firefox, VLC, Gimp, Ooo and a couple others to turn it into something not too annoying to use. And the list would definitely include Thunderbird if it could work with exchange. And I purely hate to see that AV icon in the tray.

That pretty much tells you what I run at home :)

This said, it's true DRM today is an non-issue for most - as in 95% - users, especially if you don't use WMP - which I would never do because it won't read my ogg-ripped CD's.

Now the only reason I can see you would want to run Windows-whatever at home if you're not a complete lamer is to play games, and playing games is emphatically not good for RAC.

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Now the only reason I can see you would want to run Windows-whatever at home if you're not a complete lamer is to play games, and playing games is emphatically not good for RAC.

Hey..I play games on my main cruncher without suspending any work. In the longrun with 4 cores, I only lose about 3% of the crunching potential by doing so. I didn't actually run the math to figure out the percentage, but 5% seemed too high, so 3 sounds good. I only play games at the most about 2 hours a day, and whilst most of the "newer" games utilize multiple cores, they don't max the cores out, so it's not that detrimental to the crunching. In fact, if I have an MB running, after an hour and a half of playing a game, the ETA on any MB task only increases by about 5 minutes. I run seti/BOINC like it was intended..using the 'idle' power that I would not otherwise be using.

[/off topic]

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

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Now the only reason I can see you would want to run Windows-whatever at home if you're not a complete lamer is to play games, and playing games is emphatically not good for RAC.

Hey..I play games on my main cruncher without suspending any work. In the longrun with 4 cores, I only lose about 3% of the crunching potential by doing so. I didn't actually run the math to figure out the percentage, but 5% seemed too high, so 3 sounds good. I only play games at the most about 2 hours a day, and whilst most of the "newer" games utilize multiple cores, they don't max the cores out, so it's not that detrimental to the crunching. In fact, if I have an MB running, after an hour and a half of playing a game, the ETA on any MB task only increases by about 5 minutes. I run seti/BOINC like it was intended..using the 'idle' power that I would not otherwise be using.

[/off topic]

I was thinking more in terms of CUDA than CPU... ;)

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Now the only reason I can see you would want to run Windows-whatever at home if you're not a complete lamer is to play games, and playing games is emphatically not good for RAC.

Hey..I play games on my main cruncher without suspending any work. In the longrun with 4 cores, I only lose about 3% of the crunching potential by doing so. I didn't actually run the math to figure out the percentage, but 5% seemed too high, so 3 sounds good. I only play games at the most about 2 hours a day, and whilst most of the "newer" games utilize multiple cores, they don't max the cores out, so it's not that detrimental to the crunching. In fact, if I have an MB running, after an hour and a half of playing a game, the ETA on any MB task only increases by about 5 minutes. I run seti/BOINC like it was intended..using the 'idle' power that I would not otherwise be using.

[/off topic]

I was thinking more in terms of CUDA than CPU... ;)

ah, well that's an easy one for me.. I don't do that whole deal. I have a card that is plenty capable, but I want it to be used for what I bought it for, and that is entirely my choice.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

ah, well that's an easy one for me.. I don't do that whole deal. I have a card that is plenty capable, but I want it to be used for what I bought it for, and that is entirely my choice.

Same here. I tried once to have a game running at the same time as a CUDA WU; it was not pretty. That was one of the factors that led me to brush off GPU computing for the time being.

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What if you don't want DRM ?
Like the same way others don't want Netscape or MSN etc
Is there a way to de-install it ?
Sound like a whole lotta wasted clock cycles to me.

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What if you don't want DRM ?
Like the same way others don't want Netscape or MSN etc
Is there a way to de-install it ?
Sound like a whole lotta wasted clock cycles to me.

As far as I know, the DRM is built-in to the OS or applications that use it. The only alternative is to use..alternative software that doesn't have such limitations on the particular task you're trying to do. In my case that I referenced above, WMP11 wouldn't play a DVD on a video device that didn't have HDCP, but VLC Media Player had no problem doing it. Now if it were built in to the OS, there's really only one way around it: use a different OS. So far, that's not the case.

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Linux laptop:
record uptime: 1511d 20h 19m (ended due to the power brick giving-up)

if you are not using it , it won´t waste anything, if you want to use some other program, you are free to do that, de-installing is not an issue unless you are short of space on hard drive, but you can easily buy more.

What if you don't want DRM ?
Like the same way others don't want Netscape or MSN etc
Is there a way to de-install it ?
Sound like a whole lotta wasted clock cycles to me.

Please read the article I posted. DRM code doesn't actually kick in and take up clock cycles unless you are reading DRM'd media - and even then the performance is negligible. I can run Vista just fine on an old Pentium 4 2.53GHz machine and use DRM'd media without much performance degradation, despite people looking for reasons as to why Vista is allegedly so "slow".

DRM is going to be included in every future release of Windows, Apple OS, and I wouldn't be surprised if you see it in Linux sooner or later.

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Not to differ on that point, but I believe that DRM is actually going the way of the dinosaur, it will just take some time. There seems to be a pushback from consumers on it, and companies are starting to take notice. We can only hope...

I knew things were going to get bad back in the day when I got my 1st DVD player to replace my VCR, and, just like I used to do, tried to fast forward past all the cr@p at the beginning of the tape/disk, but immeadiately discovered the Red Stop Hand of God saying Not so Fast, young man. I was, WTF is this? Did a little research, and found that now _they_ were in control of my player, I wasn't. If They wanted me to watch the FBI warning, I had to. If They wanted me to, gawd forbid, watch all the previews, I had to. I had 2 choices, turn it off, or sit thru what They wanted me to watch.

Luckily, after some companies early on went a little overboard, it got throttled back a bit, but it still irks me that I am no longer in control, and have had to accept it, which I do, but certainly don't like it. just my opinion. <rant mode off>

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I don't think DRM is going to go away. I think there's going to be a split, or perhaps a different approach to DRM. Instead of trying to control what we see and how to use it, I think DRM might turn into more of a protection system, sort of like XP's DRM whereas if the OS isn't validated with Microsoft's servers, you won't get updates to it.

Personally, that's the outcome I'd like to see. I'm not for DRM, but I can see legitimate uses despite consumers getting upset about it. In fact, the only time DRM seems to really be a nuisance is when pirates start to get involved. For everyone else, its just a minor annoyance (just like the article I posted stated).

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I don't think DRM is going to go away. I think there's going to be a split, or perhaps a different approach to DRM. Instead of trying to control what we see and how to use it, I think DRM might turn into more of a protection system, sort of like XP's DRM whereas if the OS isn't validated with Microsoft's servers, you won't get updates to it.

Personally, that's the outcome I'd like to see. I'm not for DRM, but I can see legitimate uses despite consumers getting upset about it. In fact, the only time DRM seems to really be a nuisance is when pirates start to get involved. For everyone else, its just a minor annoyance (just like the article I posted stated).

Agreed. However, it seems that comsumers are caught between IT manufacturers & Hollywood!

HTPC's, streaming media etc, all supposed to operate from one device(server?) to anywhere in the home - But to do that, one has to put the media onto that device, which in itself breaks the copyright laws.

I see that Hollywood is beginning to understand this fact by providing a digitial copy as well on some disks - Took their time in doing so!

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