Windows Vista

[occular]

D'oh.  I heard that the new Windows version - Vista - was going to be bad for digital rights management, but they have surpassed even themselves! Apparently the system will degrade audio and image output when it detects that 'protected' (copyrighted) content is being accessed. What this means is that any seriously medical uses of Vista cannot

Comments

[occular]

Interesting point. Two things that come to mind: firstly, even if you get people using only the officially allowed software on critical work PCs, it seems Vista is still unusable by some - apparently the protected content specification doesn't let you predictably work out what it is you do on your system that causes system degradation or what exact media will trigger it (although some will be obvious - e.g. the latest pop fop's new CD). That, plus things like normally inconsequential voltage drops will cause the whole system to deliberately crash, means that Vista just isn't suitable for any critical or real time application with safety concerns.

As for irresponsible use of system PCs - yeah, officially people shouldn't be doing anything non work-related on these machines. But the practicalities are that they probably will, and although the 'fault' for that does lie with them, I also think it's quite reasonable to expect that playing a CD won't cause, for example, pulmonary emboli to appear on your V/Q scan. It seems that DRM crippled computers are now moving away from being turing complete, escpecially if you allow visual and auditory output to be considered. Cross-interference between different apps *and in different types of data* (e.g. audio->video) is crazy crazy crazy.

Re: continuing the thought..

[occular]

NT based system do allow you to customize user profiles - to lock out certain parts of the start menu, disallow certain actions, etc. (XP included, although you probably need to fork out money for a copy of 2003 server or some nonsense!) But the whole IE integration thing is a bit nutso, I agree.

There are certain 3rd party tools that can rip IE out of a system:

http://www.litepc.com/ieradicator.html (this one doesn't do XP tho')

Also see nLite, which allows you to customize Windows installs. Again, kind 3rd parties have to make these tools, as "Freedom" isn't in the MS dictionary...

Shame Microsoft never gave these sorts of things as an option. But they have a monopoly to worry about...