CURRENT LARGE COMPUTER VENDORS, monitor makers, graphics card people and most notably Microsoft are being way dodgy with their current offerings. Why? DRM (Digital Rights Management) of course.
Anyone reading this knows my position on this topic, the weasels feel that they are not making enough money every time you view content. So, to make up for this, they are forcing you to pay more and ultimately stripping you of your rights through invasive DRM.
The dodgy part comes with current offerings, they are broken under LongVista, all of them. The High-Bandwidth Digital Copy Protection (HDCP) or User Reaming to Maximize Profit (URMP – pronounced 'your rump', quite fitting) means your current brand spanking new media centre PC, should you be dumb enough to buy one, will not work when Shorthorn comes out.
Yes, if you want to watch overpriced media, you need URMP. If you don't have it, your shiny new $2000 media centers and gaming stations will put up a blank screen, or if you are eminently lucky, a fuzzy image. This is to protect 'them', not you, which is why HDCP is such a stealth-evil acronym, people don't ask who is being protected, the sheeple just spend.
So, you are buying these machines, $1200 24-inch Dell monitors, $500 Nvidia GPUs, all exceedingly nice hardware BTW, and they are all broken. You are pissing your money away. Assume a three year lifespan for most hardware, probably more if you buy a pimped out SLi rig with a dual everything a a huge monitor. Sure, you are spending more than the cost of a decent car, but it really is a nice machine.
Won't you be surprised that in a year or so, your slightly less new, but still blazingly fast machine is now a doorstop. You won't be able to legally play content, and there is no realistic upgrade path. There are boxes, adaptors and eSwizzle-sticks(TM) that will make things possibly work, but they will cost more than new hardware, and almost assuredly will have less functionality.
So, where is the dodgy part? Well, they know this now, and are merrily taking your money on knowingly defective hardware. Anyone who thinks that ShortVista won't make up 85% plus of the OSes sold in the near future is crazy. With lengthening hardware life cycles, it is also fairly probable that a large number of the installations out there will be upgraded to this DRM infested nightmare.
Hardware vendors are selling you this now, and it won't work in the future. They also know it won't work, because if it would, they would be shouting it from every rooftop. So, if you are in the market right now, you have two choices. You can get something that is broken, but that is hidden from you, or you can wait. If you wait, you get URMP tainted hardware that strips you of your rights, but you get to pay more.
Basically, you are a pawn in a grand plot to funnel more money into the RIAA and MPAA member companies. Your rights? Fair play? All casualties. They know, and they are actively hiding it from you, yet you feed them more each time. µ
