Windows Vista: biggest consumer rip-off in history

The James Bond theme of some bad guy controlling the world by the simple expedient of exploding an atom bomb or perhaps through some mischief causes havoc on the Queen's abode -- pales in comparison to a new product that -- as of the moment -- appear to look nice and seems to work well.

Windows Vista -- as defined -- evokes a high place where one can see and feel a vast expanse. It is a perch where one can possibly divine the future. And that is exactly what Microsoft vision thinkers appears to have in mind. 

This operating system which was originally codenamed Longhorn had evolve from a mere operating system to one which can control not only whole industries with a stake in the personal computing  hardware (euphemistically referred to as the PC ecosystem) but also "premium content" producers -- the entire music industry and Hollywood film makers -- and 85 percent of the world spanning countries which uses the Windows OS. 

No wonder the US National Security Agency (NSA) had been given the privilege of further tweaking this program.  World dominion afterall is not solely a Republican wet dream.

The central core to world dominion seem to have been resurrected from an American business philosophy that had wrecked havoc on the American car industry -- calculated obsolescence. Every car owner knows that there will be a new car model every year and that -- at most -- the newest car will be old as soon as the car loan is paid.

In the case of Microsoft,  obsolescence is achieved by mere lack of product support or by the deliberate compression of a product life cycle achieved through negative updates and patches.

Once obsolescence is achieved, which according to Greenpeace International will require whole lot of PC hardware junkyards usually in Third World countries,  then the control begins.

Vista runs a kernel control program under a trusted computing environment that will disable most unsigned drivers, any hardware system -- including graphics and audio cards -- that is not compatible with "premium content" will not run.  Vista will simple pop out a prompt that said the program failed to load since the hardware is incompatible with content being run (even if you have the proprietory rights to the material).

Vista also hides the actual administrator control which can only be enabled if it is activated in safe mode and if you delete all other computer administrator logs.  This is a bit tricky since administrator and computer administrator accounts are like apples and oranges. 

In one case I monitored, a Photoshop program duly registered under a computer that migrated from XP Pro to Windows Vista was disabled by the Vista kernel.

A whole lot of other programs now in computers will simply not run on Vista.

A study from New Zealand University by Peter Gutmann and recently posted under the Bad Vista Movement reported: 

Vista's content protection mechanism only allows protected content to be sent over interfaces that also have content-protection facilities built in. Currently the most common high-end audio output interface is S/PDIF (Sony/Philips Digital Interface Format).

Most newer audio cards, for example, feature TOSlink digital optical output for high-quality sound reproduction, and even the latest crop of motherboards with integrated audio provide at least coax (and often optical) digital output. Since S/PDIF doesn't provide any content protection, Vista requires that it be disabled when playing protected content.

In other words if you've sunk a pile of money into a high-end audio setup fed from an S/PDIF digital output, you won't be able to use it with protected content. Instead of hearing premium high-definition audio, you get treated to premium high-definition silence.

Similarly, component (YPbPr) video will be disabled by Vista's content protection, so the same applies to a high-end video setup fed from component video.

But what if you're lucky enough to have bought a video card that supports HDMI digital video with HDCP content-protection? There's a good chance that you'll have to go out and buy another video card that really does support HDCP, because until quite recently no video card on the market actually supported it even if the vendor's advertising claimed that it did.

“None of the AGP or PCI-E graphics cards that you can buy today support HDCP […] If you've just spent $1000 on a pair of Radeon X1900 XT graphics cards expecting to be able to playback HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies at 1920×1080 resolution in the future, you've just wasted your money […] If you just spent $1500 on a pair of 7800GTX 512MB GPUs expecting to be able to play 1920×1080 HD-DVD or Blu-Ray movies in the future, you've just wasted your money”.

The two devices mentioned above are the premium supposedly-HDCP-enabled cards made by the two major graphics chipset manufacturers ATI and nVidia.

ATI was later subject to a class-action lawsuit by its customers over this deception. As late as August of 2006, when Sony announced its Blu-Ray drive for PCs, it had to face the embarrassing fact that its Blu-Ray drive couldn't actually play Blu-Ray disks in HD format: “Since there are currently no PCs for sale offering graphics chips that support HDCP, this isn't yet possible”.

The same issue that affects graphics cards also goes for high-resolution LCD monitors.

One of the big news items at the 2007 Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2007), the world's premier event for consumer high-tech, was Samsung's 1920×1200 HD-capable 27″ LCD monitor, the Syncmaster 275T, released at a time when everyone else was still shipping 24″ or 25″ monitors as their high-end product

The only problem with this amazing HD monitor is that Vista won't display HD content on it because it doesn't consider any of its many input connectors (DVI-D, 15-pin D-Sub, S-Video, and component video, but no HDMI with HDCP) secure enough.

So you can do almost anything with this HD monitor except view HD content on it. If you have even more money to burn, you can go for the largest (conventional) computer monitor made, the Samsung's stupidly large (for a computer monitor) 46″ SyncMaster 460PN.

Again though, Vista won't display HD content on it, turning your $4,000 purchase into a still-image picture frame (oddly enough, this monitor has been advertised as “HDTV ready” by retailers even though you can't display HD images on it, although in practice the term “HD-ready” has been diluted close to meaninglessness — 10-year-old 14″ CRT monitors have a higher resolution than many “HDTV-ready” TVs).

(1st part in a series)