When's Office 2006 come out?

[drothgery]

What you get is lots of "digital rights management" (Microsoft is working very closely with Hollywood to make it hard to copy music / DVD:s)

I'm just not getting the pile-on-Microsoft over this. The studios are not going to produce HD content in non-DRM formats. Period. The choice Microsoft had was to build in support for DRM, and therefore let people play HD-DVDs on their computers (if they've got a system that's DRM-enabled all the way through), or have no support for legally purchased HD content at all.

Given Microsoft's long product development cycles, you're hearing about it in Windows first. But OS X.6 (or thereabouts) will almost certainly have essentially the same DRM support, and HD content just won't be legally playable on Linux.

 

[Psionicist]

I'm just not getting the pile-on-Microsoft over this. The studios are not going to produce HD content in non-DRM formats. Period.

What's your point? I don't mind CSS-like copy protection. The studios can do whatever they want with their discs and readers. This doesn't mean it is okay for companies like Microsoft to build in DRM in kernel mode that affects the whole computer (a computer is not an entertainment system!). This is not only about stopping music and DVD piracy, it's also about locking out competition. And Microsoft are very good at this. If you read the article above you can see Microsoft are locking out programmers and computer users from the video and audio input/output. No more open formats, no other video/music players than Microsofts own...

Given Microsoft's long product development cycles, you're hearing about it in Windows first. But OS X.6 (or thereabouts) will almost certainly have essentially the same DRM support, and HD content just won't be legally playable on Linux.

In your country perhaps. In the rest of the world, you can do whatever you want with a bought CD/DVD/disc in order to play it's contents. Heck, even the new anti piracy laws in many european countries _especially_ allow the circumvention of copy protection if it's necessary to use the product (at all). I can legally use my bought movie disc on whatever platform I want, thank you very much.

I regret every single second of my life I've wasted using Microsoft products. They stand for everything wrong in the computer industry.

 

[Cthulhu's Librarian]

Longhorn Server (probably actually named the more pedestrian Windows Server 2007) is supposed to be six-nine months behind Longhorn Workstation, err, Windows Vista.

Actually, I was told that realistically, Vista will launch early 2007 (although MS is still saying publically it will be 2006), with Server coming late 2007. I don't have anything on paper, this is just what my supervisor passed along from the MS developers who we are working with. I don't know, it's just what I've been told.

 

[IronWolf]

I'm just not getting the pile-on-Microsoft over this. The studios are not going to produce HD content in non-DRM formats. Period. The choice Microsoft had was to build in support for DRM, and therefore let people play HD-DVDs on their computers (if they've got a system that's DRM-enabled all the way through), or have no support for legally purchased HD content at all.

Microsoft had some choice. Just by nature of size their decisions on what to support and not support can have wider reaching effects than just the computer industry.

...and HD content just won't be legally playable on Linux.

And people shouldn't be happy about being forced to a particular OS just because of DRM of any sort.