On 2007-02-17 12:27:24 +0000, Joe said:

Andy Hall wrote:
On 2007-02-17 10:24:18 +0000, Huge said:

On 2007-02-17, Colin Wilson
o.uk wrote:
However many of the problems are due to other manufacturers not providing
Vista compatible drivers.

The drivers for which the manuafacturers have to pay Microsoft for a
"works with Vista" stucker, before they'll allow them to installed on
it.

Anything remotely media related is now horrendously messy to write for
(which is the reason Nvidia are still struggling to get one working !)
due to onerous conditions of a "protected path environment", bit-
flipping (which is likely prone to being affected by something as simple
as a mains spike), enforced shutdown of any type of output that might be
used to copy media of any sort, and degraded video / audio of any non-
protected path hardware.

Excellent news. Anything that obstructs the march of Microsoft towards
world domination is OK by me.

Even so, one really does wonder what they think they are doing when
they make it
so hard for major hardware vendors to produce working solutions.


It also has the feel of DRM to me. Requiring hardware drivers to refuse
to work with non-approved software and suchlike.

Which is ridiculous


One of the biggest
problem areas seems, oddly enough, to be Ethernet cards.

Also ridiculous.



Surely Ethernet driving isn't rocket science, so presumably the
intention is to prevent existing NICs being used.

That would simply have the effect of slowing down adoption rate of the "OS"

Perhaps refusing to
allow promiscuous mode, to prevent streamed content being sniffed?

There are plenty of ways around that, and limiting the ability of
hardware to perform
or support existing applications would be a shot in the foot

Or
possibly to use a different network protocol in future, one protected
by Microsoft patent?

They tried that before with NetBIOS run almost directly on the wire
(NETBEUI) and
it quickly became irrelevant because it was not routable.

Potentially they could do something over IP which is opaque to the
network. There has been
a long standing battleground between MS and the network manufacturers
in that area with the
former regarding the latter as plumbers and the latter regarding the
former as incompetent
in terms of networking.