I’ve been pointed an interesting article title “A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection“. It shows many of the weaknesses of the copy protection in Windows Vista, right through to the additional costs to the rest of the computer industry. Why does it not just affect Windows Vista machines, but every new computer out there? Quite simply all the extra research and development that has to go into producing the new hardware, that will do encryption between each component in the operating system. This will push up energy costs too, as each component in the computer has to do considerably more processing. On the fly compression and encryption is computationally taxing on the computer.
I really don’t like the vendor lock in, and the fact that legally purchased media, can end up not playing on your legally purchased equipment. Ahh well, I suppose that is even more excuse to avoid Micro$oft.