Windows Vista Shines at CES: Best of Show, Computers & Hardware

ronjor · Jan 11, 2007

Exciting news from CES: We learned today that Windows Vista has been named the winner of CNET's Best of CES 2007 award in the computers and hardware category! CNET's editorial team recognizes the best new products at the show in 10 categories. They received over 650 entries and narrowed it down to 30 finalists, of which Windows Vista was one. Equally cool is that two other nominees in our category are both Windows Vista-powered PCs: the HP TouchSmart PC IQ770 and the Asus W5Fe SideShow Notebook.
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Vista Blog

Ice_Czar · Jan 11, 2007

http://www.cesweb.org/exhibitors/promotions/press.asp

Branding is critical at the International CES. Capture the attention of the world's most important industry media and financial analysts. Put your company name and logo in front of 4,500+ press and analysts who attend the show, anxious to get the scoop on the most innovative technologies and trends. Sponsor a press breakfast, lunch, service or giveaway to stretch your marketing dollars—and gain access to the industry’s top media and analysts.
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or have your CEO who's one of the wealthiest men in the world give the keynote address and gloss over the horrific DRM scheme in the latest offering

This document
analyses the cost involved in Vista's content protection, and the collateral
damage that this incurs throughout the computer industry.
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Overall, Vista's content-protection functionality seems like an astonishingly
short-sighted piece of engineering, concentrating entirely on content
protection with no consideration given to the enormous repercussions of the
measures employed. It's something like the PC equivalent of the (hastily
dropped) proposal mooted in Europe to put RFID tags into high-value banknotes
as an anti-counterfeiting measure, completely ignoring the fact that the major
users of this technology would end up being criminals who would use it to
remotely identify the most lucrative robbery targets.

To add insult to injury, consider what this enormous but ultimately wasted
effort could have been put towards. Microsoft is saying that Vista will be
the most secure version of Windows yet, but they've been saying that for every
new Windows release since OS security became a selling point. I don't think
anyone's under any illusions that Vista PCs won't be crawling with malware
shortly after the bad guys get their hands on them. But what if the Vista
content-protection technology had instead been applied towards malware
protection? Instead of a separate protection domain for video playback, we
might have a separate protection domain for banking and credit card details.
Instead of specialised anti-debugging technigues to stop users getting at even
one frame of protected content, we could have those same techniques combatting
malware hooking itself into the OS. The list goes on and on, with all of the
effort being misapplied to DRM when it could have been used to combat malware
instead. What a waste. What a waste.

The worst thing about all of this is that there's no escape. Hardware
manufacturers will have to drink the kool-aid (and the reference to mass
suicide here is deliberate [Note O]) in order to work with Vista: "There is no
requirement to sign the [content-protection] license; but without a
certificate, no premium content will be passed to the driver". Of course as a
device manufacturer you can choose to opt out, if you don't mind your device
only ever being able to display low-quality, fuzzy, blurry video and audio
when premium content is present, while your competitors don't have this
(artificially-created) problem.

As a user, there is simply no escape. Whether you use Windows Vista, Windows
XP, Windows 95, Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, Solaris (on x86), or almost any other
OS, Windows content protection will make your hardware more expensive, less
reliable, more difficult to program for, more difficult to support, more
vulnerable to hostile code, and with more compatibility problems. Because
Windows dominates the market and device vendors are unlikely to design and
manufacture two different versions of their products, non-Windows users will
be paying for Windows Vista content-protection measures in products even if
they never run Windows on them.
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but hey it got the CNET's Best of CES 2007 award

Ice_Czar · Jan 12, 2007

http://i12.tinypic.com/440zocl.jpg

its 8:00 am in Washington
I give it maybe an hour or two before its deleted

Peter2150 · Jan 12, 2007

Well that is indeed cool new. It can say at the Show for a while, as far as I am concerned. I've played, and will play again, but Vista is not on my permenant horizon for a time to be determined.

Pete

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Windows Vista Shines at CES: Best of Show, Computers & Hardware

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