> Also wondering if Windows Vista might not be a factor. Word I get on early marks are, uh...not encouraging.
An understatement if I ever heard one. If you must run Windows and someone tries to sell you Vista, insist on an upgrade to XP!
There's a paper by a well-known security expert "A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection": http://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/~pgut001/pubs/vista_cost.html
His "Executive Executive Summary" is "The Vista Content Protection specification could very well constitute the longest suicide note in history."
To summarise a fairly complex argument, Vista is fundamentally wrong-headed. Its attempts to control access to "premium content" waste every resource the system has, and make everything more complex, hence less secure and less reliable.
There are two basic approaches to system security. Normal systems -- Windows, Linux, Mac, IBM mainframes, anything -- rely on "discretionary access control"; users have some means of control over who accesses their files. They exercise their discretion in how to use that.
The alternative is "mandatory access control", as used by the military, spy agencies, etc. The system enforces all the controls and the user has little or no opportunity to exercise any discretion. If I am working on Project Wombat, every file I create is automatically tagged "top secret: wombat". Nobody can access it unless they both have top secret clearance and are authorised for that project. I cannot print it unless the printer is cleared. I cannot send it in email unless everything is cleared -- the email application, the network it will be sent over, and the recipient. And so on.
Of course such systems tend to be both remarkably expensive and distinctly difficult to use. This may be worthwhile if you have important secrets to protect.
What Vista does, though, is try to graft mandatory access control for certain types of data -- notably high resolution movie and sound files -- on top of an existing OS. I do not believe that can be done; if you want mandatory access control, you need to design for it from the ground up. Of course, I could be wrong.
Anyway, it is still expensive. The user pays and the entertainment industry benefits; how sweet!
And it is still inconvenient. Got a blu-ray drive, a high-quality video card, and a hi-res TV? Sorry, if the interface to that TV is not "cleared" (if someone might tap it and (horrors!) "pirate" a movie), then Vista will deliberately downgrade the signal to some lower resolution. You have no discretion here; this is enforced.
The P in PC is for "personal". I am rather profoundly hostile to the notion of giving control of large parts of my PC to movie companies. You'd have to pay me a substantial sum to ever use Vista.
-- Sandy Harris, Nanjing, China