On Microsoft Vista and why I'm going to learn Linux

In a few days I will meet my new laptop for the first time (my old one was stolen by a bastard in Malta...a story for another time, maybe when I find out what the verdict in his trial is), a shiny new Toshiba courtesy of the Bannerman Foundation. In between revisions on fellowship essays, I have been looking into this whole Windows Vista thing, which comes stock on my new laptop. As the Queen (ah, another blog entry...British royalty, an exercise in the ridiculous) would say, we are not impressed. There are of course the usual problems of poor driver support and flaws in the operating system (OS) that cause problems (crashes, not behaving well with other programs, etc.). These are not unusual for a Microsoft OS release: Windows XP endured similar problems. These are not what bother me.

Two things bother me. First: the increasing hardware demands of Microsoft. Second, Microsoft's integration of digital rights management (DRM) in the OS. I'll address these in turn.

First, hardware demands. I am the only person I know who has a computer that can run Vista. The memory and graphics demands in particular are tremendous compared with XP. Sure, Vista Aero, the flashy new interface on Premium editions, is nice. But the OS running alone, nothing else, takes up over 500 MB of RAM. 500! that's HALF A GIGABYTE. That is incredible to me. As it is, my wife's laptop, my brother's desktop, my mother's desktop, and my stepfather's desktop would all have to be replaced in toto (well, maybe not the hard drives). That's an awful lot of expense on top of $200 for the Home Premium edition (there is a cheaper, non-Aero version, but then what's the point?). Here's the rub: in a couple years, they will have no choice as Microsoft phases out support for XP, leaving it increasingly vulnerable to security threats. What's more, even if you have the hardware to handle Vista's neediness, it seems just wasteful to have so much in the way of resources tied up at the get go. Imagine how much better your programs would run if Vista was less greedy. This resource intense approach seems to be the trend for Microsoft. Each major release of its Windows OS uses more resources than the last. It was the same upgrading from Windows 98/2000 to XP, but the leap this time is eye watering.

Second, Microsoft has decided to incorporate DRM into its OS in a major way. Ostensibly, DRM is designed to protect copyrighted content from 'evil' pirates. DRM 'protects' downloaded songs from iTunes. DRM has a history of causing problems. As you can see in the video I posted the other day, DRM doesn't interoperate well. Apple DRM doesn't talk to Sony DRM or IBM DRM and so on. An Australian IT website reports that Sony-BMG CDs with copy protection are incompatible with Mac, making it impossible for a Mac user who legally bought and owes the CD to listen to it on their legal iPod. Speaking of Sony, who doesn't remember the Sony CD spyware problem. I think its pretty clear that DRM, while it may be alright in concept, is at best problematic in execution. Peter Gutmann, a computer science professor at the University of Aukland has a long (and I mean long, with lots of detail) discussion of the problems surrounding DRM implementation in Vista. Fortunately, there is a shorter (if 80 slides is short) PDF of his PowerPoint presentation on the matter. I'll summarize it thus: Vista DRM implementation is an extremely bad idea, unlikely to work, certain not to work in the way it was conceived, and certain to cause real problems for users. DRM in a computer revolves around establishing secure information transmission pathways. That is, from the moment you engage the media (download a song, put in a DVD or CD, etc.) to the time the media is incident on your sensory capacities, the information cannot be accessed other than by secure hardware. The point is, in short, to keep you or anyone from being able to copy the information into a format that is not secure (and then ostensibly distribute the now unsecured movie or music on the internet). This means that every step of the processing chain must be secure, from the drive to the speakers or monitor. I'll provide a few examples. Imagine, if you will, that you have purchased a new, protected content CD. Let's say you want to listen to your new CD on your computer. The connection between your CD drive and your audio card is what is called S/PDIF connection, a verrrryyyyy common format and in many computer configurations the only connection between the CD drive and the audio card. It is also not secure. So if you put your new protected content CD in your computer, you won't hear a damn thing if you are using a S/PDIF connection. Here is another example from Gutmann's website:

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 [Note F]. 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.

Wouldn't that suck. Long story short, Microsoft is flexing its monopolistic muscle to constrain, in a significant way, what we can do with our computers. I'm sorry, but if I have an iPod and a monstrous LCD monitor, I want nothing impairing my ability to take full advantage of them or anything else I use on my computer. Vista and DRM are a disaster in progress, and I don't want to play a part.

There is a third issue. The information revolution has been a boon for society. I don't begrudge corporations making money off the revolution, but I do begrudge companies controlling the revolution, and that is what Microsoft does. I'm not saying they are malicious. I'm sure the people at Microsoft are just doing their jobs, and they make some very good software, but their control of the operating system, and their ability from that vantage point to control a great many things, deeply bothers me. The opportunity for innovation is repressed. New ways of using computers, both hardware and software, are stillborn. As I said before, Mitchell Baker of the Mozilla Foundation, makers of Firefox, gets it right:

it's hard to replicate interest in public benefit as opposed to shareholder personal wealth

That is a profound statement. Shouldn't we be supporting organizations that work for the public benefit, generating new ideas and ways to improve our lives, over organizations that seek to enrich a few whenever we can? I'm not calling for communism here; corporations and the market play an important role in society. In fact, I think moving away from Microsoft's OS is enhancing and empowering the market. As it is, there is no market; its all Microsoft, all the time. So, when I get my new laptop, I'll be formatting the Vista off and replacing it with a dual boot system: Windows XP and Linux (I can't decide yet between Ubuntu, Linux Mint, or Kubuntu). Linux has come a long way, and in many aspects it surpasses Windows. The only drawback, as far as I can tell, is that games don't run well on Linux. I don't have much time for that sort of thing anyway, but for those of you that do, the more people that use Linux, the more game makers will pay attention to it. In case you want to join me, I've provided some useful links:

How to replace Windows with Linux

How to install a dual boot system (with Windows XP already installed)

Ubuntu 7.10: Gutsy Gibbon

Linux mint 4.0

Oh yeah, and for those of you who want your computer to look very sleek, well Linux outshines Vista. And for those of you with older computers, Linux is very older computer friendly because its resource demands are orders of magnitude smaller than Windows Vista.