Vista Will Steal Your Rights, Then Destroy The World

Windows Vista is unlikely to destroy the world all by itself of course, but as this interesting article points out, it will certainly help fill landfill sites, increase global warming, and result in mountains of perfectly good hardware being thrown away. Something to think about. As well as all of that it also takes away your right to do what you want with your own computer. I think this is going to hit creative people first, but will there be a backlash when people realise they can't watch their BlueRay or HD-DVD films because Microsoft doesn't approve of their monitor? We'll see.

Ha! Nice One, Bill...

Today sees the general retail launch of Microsoft Windows Vista. This isn't a cheap thing to buy in the UK, being about twice as much as it is in the US, but let's leave that aside for the minute. For now I feel I have to draw attention to the ridiculous things that Bill Gates is claiming, specifically that Vista is "dramatically more secure than any other operating system released". Let's just think about that statement for a minute as it's a ridiculous claim on a couple of levels.

Firstly, you never claim that sort of thing on the day of release. Let's just imagine that someone releases a worm that breaks Vista in the next few months. It's almost certain to happen. It's going to make Bill (and Microsoft, by extension) look silly, and a bit cocky, while just saying "it's better than XP" wouldn't. Second, it's simply not true. I'm willing to accept that it's the most secure version of Windows ever, but any IT professional knows that Windows is a bit of a joke when it comes to security compared with any UNIX-based OS. There's a good reason why you just don't get viruses on Sun boxes and Macs - they're inherently more secure from the bottom-up than Windows is. UNIX has been around in one form or another since the 70's, and with software the older something is, the more time people have had to find bugs in it. Developing a modern OS from scratch is always going to result in more bugs than anything UNIX based. Developing something from current Windows code is going to be even worse.

Let's hope that people don't fall for Bill's PR line. Where is the innovation? Were is WinFS? Where is, oh, anything that's not pretty-much ripped off OSX? Buy Vista if you have to use Windows, but don't claim it's more secure than anything else. I'm not knocking it - I'll install it where I would have had XP before, but it's not Gods gift to computing and I'd bet Windows users will still have to suffer virus checkers, spyware detectors, and all of the other stuff you have to currently run if you want to use Windows on the Internet.

BBC On Demand

Technological progress has been slowed today by Ofcom after they ruled that the BBCs plans to provide content on demand are too good and might hurt commercial competitors. Don't Ofcom realise that this ruling is completely stupid? The 'commercial competitors' won't be showing BBC programmes anyway, and the BBC service will only show BBC programmes. Where is the cross-over? As for 'damage to DVD sales', they are DVD sales that the BBC will lose! The whole thing is utterly stupid, and thanks to some stupid old men with weird ideas, having all of the BBC content I have already paid for (through my licence fee) available on demand looks like being that bit further away.

Vista and DRM

The fact that Vista is locked-down and slightly crippled thanks to DRM is relatively well known in techno-geek circles, but do consumers know what they are facing if they shell out for it? There's an article on the BBC today that mentions the forced degradation of video quality if you play your (legally purchased) content on equipment that the film studios don't want you to use. What's worse is that even if you have the right equipment, playing the content is going to cost you CPU cycles just to remove all of the DRM that has been added anyway. Extra CPU cycles means a slower computer and more electricity used, along with more global warming of course. And for what? Those who want to rip the films and distribute them on the P2P networks are going to get around this anyway, so the only people who lose-out are legitimate users.

I predict that some people will defend Microsoft and claim that it's not their fault if the film studios insist on this DRM. Well, guess again. Do you really think that the studios would release films that couldn't play on PCs and 'media centres'? It's an increasingly large segment of the market, and essential if high definition discs are going to take-off. Microsoft had a choice, but they decided to play along at a real, monetary cost to all of their users. Now of course I'm picking on Microsoft here and other software vendors might do the same, but let's face it, we're talking about the Mac and Linux as far as competitors go. Linux won't have DRM, and Apple have a good track record compared to Microsoft. There's no tax to Universal on an iPod, unlike the Zune - there's no limitation to 96kbps MP3 encoding in iTunes, unlike Windows Media. Time will tell, but it looks like Windows users will find their ability to actually use their own machines being increasingly crippled. It's time they made a stand.

Slingbox

So anyway, a couple of weeks ago I got around to setting-up my Slingbox. Here it is still in its box and ready to join its friends under the telly:




It's pretty small. For comparison, here it is alongside a bottle of beer and a Wii remote:



Cool. Anyway, as you can see from the first photo I need it to 'play nice' with my Tivo and cable TV box. In theory the cable should be ok if it can live with the Tivo, and indeed it can. Although there are no spare SCART or composite outputs on the Tivo, the Slingbox comes with an adapter that sits between the SCART socket and cable and sneaks some composite video out. This goes into the Slingbox. Out of the Slingbox come two IR LEDs that you position in front of the Tivo so that it receives their signals, as if they were the remote. The Slingbox then plugs into the gigabit Ethernet switch that I have at that end of the room.

So does it work well? The answer is yes, it most definitely does! I downloaded the latest Mac Slingplayer software from Slingmedia site and gave it a go. Video quality is excellent, and alongside the video feed is a 'virtual' version of the Tivo remote that behaves exactly as the real one does. The software determines how much bandwidth you have and adjusts the video feeds accordingly, so with gigabit Ethernet in the house it does pretty well. I also tried the Windows client on my work laptop and it's not bad from the office - certainly watchable.

All in all a pretty good gadget then. While I could just get a USB TV tuner, I have to say that it's very nice to be able to watch my own Tivo from anywhere. I can also set it to record stuff if I'm out too, and watch pre-recorded TV, so it's much more useful that just watching what's on at the moment. Top stuff. Coincidentally, Dixons are selling it for 40 quid off from their Web site if you enter 'NOW35' at the checkout. Top tip from Google sponsored links there.

Macworld

Just a quick post - I'm away with work and grabbing two minutes. So, Macworld happened. The AppleTV (aka iTV) is pretty sweet, but check out the iPhone! It's super sexy. Sign me up for one... just as soon as they reach the UK. Looks like that might be at the 'end of the year' though.. bah!

Good old Apple. When they do something they do it right.

On OSX and Vista

In my 'tech predictions for 2007' I remarked on how Vista is a poor copy of OSX. This irked several people and I received the expected accusations of being a fanboy. Well, it's not just me - this bias-free article from InformationWeekcompares OSX with Vista. Have a look. Most IT professionals won't argue that OSX isn't technically superior, and it's nice to have an article to point people to.

2007 Tech Predictions

Predicting what may happen in the coming year is one of those entertaining traditions that lots of people like to maintain, so I felt I would join in! The danger of predicting technology trends is obvious of course, but I should be relatively safe with a 12 month timeframe! So, here goes...

1. On its UK launch the PS3 will sell fairly well, but by the end of the year the Nintendo Wii will have the most units shipped. XBox360 will be in second place.


2. The Zune won't sell well and will quietly be dropped. I mean... who owns one? The only one I've ever actually seen 'in the flesh' was owned by a Microsoft employee.


3. Vista will finally ship (what is it... 3 years late?) to generally underwhelmed consumers. The only people who will bother with it are those who will get it bundled with their new PCs, but of course it will become the dominant OS by default. Meanwhile, Apple will release Leopard so that MS will have something new to copy (badly) for their next version of Windows. To be fair, Vista looks better than XP and will probably make my life at work (where I have no choice but to use Windows) easier, but it's very little very late, and hardly 'innovative'


4. Consumer broadband connectivity will be high enough to really start eating into TV viewing. Channel 4 have their on-demand service already of course, and once the BBC service is running I predict that people will start to drop cable and satellite subscriptions. After all, these are mostly held for the convenience of 'something good being on' when you sit down to watch, rather than the number of channels.


5. The fullscreen video iPod will launch, with moderate success. Technogeeks will love it, but most people don't want to watch video on small devices. Much more successful will be the video downloads from the iTunes store though - people can use this and still watch video on their monitors (and TVs, thanks to things like the iTV), and that's what they want. The new video iPod will simply be a channel to enable this.


6. Hardware sales of desktops and laptops will rise, but more slowly than the last few years. Most people who want a computer already own one that is powerful enough for their needs. More gaming will take place on consoles, so the major driver for more powerful computers will be lessened. The MacOS will see a modest increase its overall percentage of OSs in use, as will Linux. Mac hardware will see a good boost since people can now run Windows on it, if they must. If Leopard really does run Windows apps seamlessly then that will help too since people won't have to install Parallels, or any other third-party software.

OK, there are my predictions. Let's see what the year brings!