Beware - The computer you buy may stop working in the future
I've written elsewhere about the potential for "bit rot" to rob us of valuable information. Did you know that with Microsoft Vista it is possible for Microsoft to make the hardware you purchased to run it not work properly - even years from now? Talk about bit-rot - that takes the cake.
It all comes down to the changes that Microsoft has virtually forced upon the hardware industry to support the concepts of Vista surrounding Digital Rights Management and the notion of "revocation" of the rights to run a driver for the particular hardware you bought, especially video and audio.
No matter why Microsoft has so bent over backwards to do whatever the big media companies want regarding DRM, (and I have my ideas on that) the fact remains that they have gone about it in a way that I find personally repulsive - they've made the owner of the hardware that their Vista runs on into a hostage to Vista's concept of "right" and Microsoft's contracts with the creators of the various software drivers the hardware manufacturers have to create.
Even if you don't try to circumvent the DRM - you never even play a DVD or CD and don't download music or video from the internet, if the manufacturer of the video card you paid hundreds of dollars for decides not to pay Microsoft's developer fees one year, or somehow annoys Microsoft in some other fashion, Microsoft can tell Vista to stop working with your video card - even years later! You have no rights!
The hardware manufacturers can't create drivers that run with Vista without Microsoft's blessing - and the extra effort needed to make the drivers check up on whether someone (you the owner for example) has tried to break the DRM or modify the system with something that is not Microsoft approved, or any of a whole list of things people have been doing with their systems for decades, makes the cost of the add-ons way more expensive.
I recommend reading Peter Gutmann's A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection for an eye opening view of what this means in the real world.
As for my view on why Microsoft has done this when they could just as easily have turned their backs on the obviously desperate media giants - I think they (Microsoft) are trying to make their Vista OS the only thing that TVs and other media devices of the future can incorporate at the factory, so everyone will end up with Vista in their home just by purchasing a TV or Stereo.
Welcome to the new millenium - you pay the price but they (Microsoft) call the tune.
Of course you can always use your no longer functional hardware with Linux - and you'll get back all that extra horsepower that Vista was using (checks every 30 ms) to watch and make sure you didn't do anything they didn't like.
