Vista installation prompt

[Dr Mordrid]

[lowlifecat]

:d

i see they updated the XP promtp

[Evildead666]

You forgot the "please insert human male appendage into DVD tray hole and close DVD tray."

Probably just as painful...

Considering the size of the EULA's these days, its probably in there somewhere

[Gurm]

Y'know, if you're going to make a "funny" installer prompt, maybe just maybe you ought to use ... y'know ... English. *sigh*

Signed,

Gurm the Grammar Nazi

[High_Jumbllama]

Why bother when it was all about insulting M$. In my experience, XP and 2K have been very stable. Security and bloat are entirely different matters. Visa will have some stability issues at the beginning. All operating systems do.

[agallag]

Visa will have some stability issues at the beginning. All operating systems do.

I've been running Vista since early December. No stability issues so far.

[schmosef]

I've been running Vista since early December. No stability issues so far.

I used to have stability issues with the most recent pre-RTM version of Vista after about an hour of use.

I just installed the RTM but haven't played with it yet. The majority of my work is done in Visual Studio .Net 2003, which will never be officially supported and Visual Studio .Net 2005, which isn't officially supported yet.

I have some ideas for what I think would be popular sidebar gadgets so I plan to play with it some more in the next few weeks.

Anyway, I have to say that Vista is quite impressive. It seems faster than XP to me. I think that's because I have a dual core CPU and Vista, from what I've read, has better low level support for multithreading.

[agallag]

I just installed Vista on my single core A64 3200+ HTPC this weekend. It's also running quite well, and the new media center interface is nice too.

[Dr Mordrid]

One of my main gripes is grenade pins, AKA 'tilt bits'

[DGhost]

Doc - has anyone actually seen these interfaces in use? I mean, seriously?

I have yet to actually see an article on Vista's content protection schemes that are not total FUD and entirely based out of rumors, old info and speculation.

That article itself has quite a few inconsistancies in it. Not sure where they got their info from, but it's largely bullshit.

[Dr Mordrid]

Thank you for that concise demonstration of denial

For "bullshit" they're getting a lot of attention on the tech sites.

In most cases tilt bits will rear their heads under DX10, HD and multichannel audio playback and on systems where the voltage control isn't as perfect as Microcrap desires. This means that changing CPU voltages etc. could break trip their DRM.

Also be aware that tilt bits aren't checked at each file startup but could happen (especially for HD DVD/BR) at the start of every video frame - 216.000 times for a 2 hour movie.

These requirements and the need to design in a related HDCP DRM chip are a large part of why DX10 video cards have been delayed.

http://www.drmwatch.com/special/article.php/3529586

To implement OCP, device drivers have numerous new security responsibilities. Drivers must ensure that the hardware they control is authentic and is not being tampered with. Such checks are intended to prevent content from being captured by substituting bogus hardware. For example, there is a new mechanism called "tilt bits". Like the tilt sensor in a pinball machine, which detects when the table is being shaken or abused and terminates the game, the "tilt bits" mechanism requires the driver to make checks on a regular basis so that it can inform Windows if it detects anything suspicious. Windows will respond by terminating the game: no more playing of protected until after a clean reboot. These checks are intended to happen frequently, perhaps even with every video frame.

http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?newsid=7675

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/ati_nvidia_hdcp_support/

http://www.geekzone.co.nz/juha/1908

Even the hardware designs of the devices have to be different now, to eliminate any unprotected signal paths. Hardware and the software drivers for devices must set "tilt bits" in case they notice anything unusual. Gutmann points out that this will lead to far less resilient hardware that may stop working if there's say a power surge that sets the "tilt bit".

Worse, malware writers could exploit the "tilt bits" in order to launch a huge Denial of Service attack.

The "Gutmann" referred to is Peter Gutmann PhD of Auckland U., a rather noted computer scientist who developed cryptlib and was a contributor to the development PGP 2.0. He also wrote this paper on Vista's DRM.

Looks like this story and others are having an effect; the used license market for XP and Win2K is booming.

[DGhost]

Doc... the first article (The TechWorld.com one) is full of quite impressively ignorant statements.

The author uses the changes in the Vista Audio Stack designed to simplify and improve quality of audio playback as support for his DRM arguments. They have greatly simplified the audio stack for stability reasons, to make audio playback more consistant, and to make it more pro-application friendly. They actually did an excellent job with it. Unfortunately, two of the side effects of their decision is that hardware accelerated 3d effects go out the window, and you remove the ability to do echo cancellation.

The fact that Creative has spent the last 6 years releasing drivers that routinely cause system crashes and whatnot is a fairly good incentive to implement these changes, especially when whole interfaces were being developed to entirely bypass the windows audio stack because it sucked so bad.

The author keeps specifying "Premium Content" like it is a magical thing. No, it's not a magical thing. The application would have to flag it as protected and enable the nessicary features in Vista. If the application does not enable protected output then it won't be enabled - period. It also means that the application has to support all of these interfaces. Clearly, it becomes a design decision when developing the application. With the added complexity of supporting this, I doubt that most developers choose to support it unless they want to enable playback of HD copy protected media.

His third case of FUD was an example involving downsampling and upsampling quality with the output of a medical imaging application. Obviously the author really has no idea how applications or these interfaces work. Seriously. Like I said above - the application has to request protected output modes. It's not just *BAM* magically enabled on overlays or when using DXVA.

One other thing - even with HD-DVD's and Blu-Ray, there is a flag set on each video that decides if it gets downscaled or not when played over analog outputs. That is part of the specification.

The author further goes on to talk about the 'tilt bits' you are fond of. Nothing particularly new there. Windows has, for a long time, provided ways for drivers to report errors and metrics information. They just made it mandatory when displaying protected content. In light of the current push on power management (and the native support for CPU throttling in Vista), I highly doubt that voltage changes will directly signal a faulty device or compromised playback. Most of these checks will have to be performed by the device driver and then reported back to Windows.

And as far as checking status goes... you wanna bitch about how much checking the drivers integrity 24-30 times a second adds to your processor load? are you shitting me? It doesn't require much to check (basically a simple thumbs up from the device driver when asked) and you are bitching additional overhead in this age of
dual core 2GHZ+ processors? are you ****ing bonkers? Your computer does more work every second if you have a ****ing USB device plugged in and sitting idle. That's pretty much icing on the cake considering how robust the driver model is. To decode an HD movie takes about a billion times as much processing power and you bitch about the system polling drivers (which it does anyways, even in XP) to verify it's integrity?

How about this - consider it a trade for the processor savings you get by running Aero and using the DXVA pipeline over using XP and Overlays. You still win out.

He then talks about how CPU intensive output is going to be because it is now required to output AES-128 encrypted content. Guess again - thats HDCP talking. since HDCP requires additional hardware to support as it is, it's not going to see a driver level implementation and that will pretty much entirely be handled in hardware out of sight of the system. Ie, it will have a negligable overheard compared to what the author seems to predict.

I call bullshit on the fact that HDCP DRM chips are causing delays on DX10 parts. Sony has been selling NV 7300/7600 boards that do properly enable HDCP output for quite some time. The parts are out there and ready. NVidia uses an MSI manufactured 7600 board for their PureVideo HD demo systems to show off their HD DVD playback support. DX10 boards have been available for how long via the NV 8800 series?

No, the big delay for DX10 parts coming out is the fact that DirectX 10 IS NOT OUT YET. It is going to take another year or so after it for major developers to support it in products.

Most of Vista's DRM technology requires that an application be written to support it. It is not something they are keen on implementing, but it is something they have to do if they want to offer features and technology to their clients. The choice is either implement the interfaces and technology in such a way that it pleases the DRM mongers (ie, Sony) or have a platform that is completely unsupported for Retail HD content.

I fully expect that any company that implements an HD-DVD decoded that does not follow content protection requirements will find itself facing the full brunt of the movie industry. Microsoft did what they had to so that vendors could implement it without it turning into a 3d accelerator debacle like DX6/7/OpenGL/Glide/etc. That does not mean it will be active all the time, nor does it mean that it is nessicarily going to be used by your software.


Thats just sifting through the FUD of one article. Which isn't even the source of all this. The source of all this is Gutmann's article where he practices fearmongering and lashes out against Microsoft. The guy, as smart as he might be, has completely missed the point of Vista's DRM and turned it into an apocalyptical nightmare where your PC is going to swallow your soul if you look at it wrong. I'm not ****ing kidding you.

Just because you are a PhD doesn't mean you can't be wrong. It just means you tend to eat your foot a little harder than others.