UK Greens Declare Vista Bad For Environment

schwaang writes "The UK Green Party says that Vista's DRM requirements will force many unnecessary hardware upgrades. Quoting: 'There will be thousands of tonnes of dumped monitors, video cards, and whole computers that are perfectly capable of running Vista — except for the fact they lack the paranoid lock down mechanisms Vista forces you to use. That's an offensive cost to the environment. Future archaeologists will be able to identify a "Vista Upgrade Layer" when they go through our landfill sites.'"

Strange...

[tgd]

I didn't have to upgrade a damn thing... on a two year old Celeron system.

Maybe MSDN Vista is missing the "upgrade all your crap" bit being set.

Re:How many dgrees

[BeardsmoreA]

Because of the foulness of HDCP and friends

Re:Linux is bad for it too

[jimstapleton]

4 RWs, cycling. 2 For FreeBSD (x86, x86-64), and 2 for Linux (whicheverdistro someone has convinced me to try out recently).

They don't go in the trash.

Re:Am I missing something?

[a_nonamiss]

The whole DRM thing concerns high definition media. Have you tried playing Blu-Ray on said laptop? HD-DVD? If you did, I think you'd find that you can't play it in high definition. It will downgrade the signal if you try to play it on your 2-year old Celeron, and will not play in full 1080p glory. That's what all the bruhaha is about. It's not a big deal to some people (like myself, who has a 50-inch HDTV and could care less about playing it on his PC) but to others this functionality is important. The bottom line is we aren't getting what we paid for.

Re:Linux is bad for it too

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoever modded parent as Flaimbait needs a sarcasm check.

+1 irony

Re:How many dgrees

[Anonymous Coward]

Vista's DRM will support High-Bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) which will regulate what types of periferals (monitors, sound cards, video cards, etc.) that can show, play, encode, decode, etc. the content. For example, you may not be able to watch a movie (or only be able to watch it at lower definition) unless your video card monitor and sound card are all approved by Mircosoft. HDCP will only be supported by new components hence the need to upgrade. Monitors are paricularly harmful to the environment because they contain quite a bit of lead. http://electronics.howstuffworks.com/question678.h tm [howstuffworks.com]

Re:Am I missing something?

[Anonymous Coward]

As TFA states, its if you want to watch an HD-DVD or BluRay at full resolution that the DRM will kick in and deny you any "fair use" rights on anything but the latest kit. Unless, of course, you just downloaded the HD-DVD of bittorrent.

Re:Am I missing something?

[heroofhyr]

You didn't mention whether or not you've tried running any high-definition video playback on the machine. Nobody said Vista itself won't run on a computer/laptop that lacks DRM support in the display, just that HD video playback will be impossible. The quality will be automatically downgraded to quasi-DVD quality even if your non-HDCP monitor supports HD-DVD. In other words, you can probably play HD-DVDs on your laptop, but I'll bet the video looks exactly like a regular DVD.

Re:Your Celeron can't RUN HD content period.

[Goaway]

Vista isn't stopping you

Incorrect. It is stopping you.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_Video_Path [wikipedia.org]

You can change it

[Anonymous Coward]

I managed to change it back to shutdown by going through the advanced options in Power Options in the control panel. I'm not in front of my Vista machine right now so I can't give you the details, but you should be able to find it.

Re:Linux is bad for it too

[segin]

At least CD-Rs can be easily recycled. My local recycling centre accepts old CDs as a recyclable material.

Re:Linux is bad for it too

[the plant doctor]

For Ubuntu try this:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/install.exe [ubuntu.com]

For Debian, the sister project of Ubuntu's project:
http://goodbye-microsoft.com/index.html [goodbye-microsoft.com]

*disclaimer, I've not tried either one. Just thought they might be of use to you in this situation.

Re:Linux is bad for it too

[somegeekynick]

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade :P Btw, why use CD-R's when you have CD-RW's. P.S. I haven't gone through all the comments, and I don't care if the two lines above are redundant. ;)

Re:Am I missing something?

[mobby_6kl]

>Have you tried playing Blu-Ray on said laptop? HD-DVD? If you did, I think you'd find that you can't play it in high definition.

Have you? I think you'd find that the current HD-DVD movies don't have the flag that turns on the degradation requirement. But still, the 2-year old Celeron won't play movies in their full 1080p glory, because my 3 year old P4 can't properly play even 720p video without choking.

Re:Am I missing something?

[massysett]

Have you tried playing Blu-Ray on said laptop? HD-DVD? If you did, I think you'd find that you can't play it in high definition.

Have you tried it? The non-HDCP signal degradation is optional, at the disc maker's option. My understanding is that most discs being shipped now do *not* have this degradation option enabled, because the studios know that most equipment out there right now does not have HDCP. A link from the article below claims that Hollywood promises not to enable the degradation until 2012 (take that promise for what it's worth.) So if your ancient laptop actually had a Blu-ray, it would probably play fine.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image_Constraint_Toke n [wikipedia.org]

I'm no DRM or Vista fan, but a lot of people on both sides of this debate are spreading misinformation.

Re:Linux is bad for it too

[Directrix1]

BTW, I ran the Vista RC on a P4 1.9GHz, 512 MB RAM, and integrated Intel video. No speed problems at all (just no Aero). It ran about the same as 2000 did before it.

Re:How many dgrees

[vertinox]

Almost all of that lead is vitrified in the glass, just the same way that leaded crystal drinking glasses are chock full of lead. If the lead is immobilized enough to drink out of, it wouldn't seem that monitor glass would pose a major threat.

If the monitors were crushed in the trash compacting process the glass may become shatter and/or more powder like. Most land fill companies don't really sort monitors or at least the curbside trash pickup guys mostly don't. There might be a group down the line that attempt to remove as much metal as possible for the scrap heap but their high power magnets might not pick up monitors and tv etc.

Moreover, monitors would generally end up in a landfill with some kind of containment system.

Which is the key problem. Since not all land fills follow hard line specs depending on which state you live in.

Re:Linux is bad for it too

[cortana]

I've burned more copies of Windows to slipstream in hot fixes, service packs and new device drivers, all because MS are too retarded to make Windows try to load drivers off anything other than a goddamn floppy disk. :)

Re:Strange...

[paganizer]

This will probably be flamebaited, but...
"vista is 5 years more advanced than XP", huh? what, exactly, are the features of Vista that make it a "upgrade" from WinXP, or better yet, Win2k?
Is there ANY feature of Vista that will improve my ability to do ANYTHING AT ALL I currently do on my Win2k machine?
NOTE: Due to Microsoft failing to release the software after developing it (except to a $6000 version of Win2k Server), my Win2k machine does not fully make use of a 64-bit CPU, or a "hyperthreading" intel CPU. I'm aware of this, and don't consider it a problem as there are no 64-bit apps or games that look interesting; and my dual AMD CPU motherboard unclogs it's nose at hyperthreading, it's a silly concept. The only thing that makes me even consider changing operating systems is the 64-bit thing; eventually, software developers are going to start using it... I just hope Debian & WINE will be up to the task by then.

So, I repeat, to the parent & everyone else who even begins to consider "upgrading" to Vista: Is there ANY feature of Vista that will improve my ability to do ANYTHING AT ALL I currently do on my DRM-free Win2k machine?

Re:Am I missing something?

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

You should only have to upgrade your optical drive to view HD content.

Wrong. Decoding H.264 at HD-DVD or Blu-Ray bitrates requires some serious horsepower. My 2.2GHz Athlon 64, for example, just can't hack it. You either need hardware acceleration (high end GPU) or a fast CPU (probably dual-core).

Try downloading a 1080p trailer from Apple sometime. Notice how, even with the fastest software decoder (CoreAVC, although libavcodec comes close), your formerly fast CPU can barely manage to keep up. Now consider that Blu-Ray/HD-DVD have considerably higher bitrates.

If you're running Vista, however, your older monitor that is missing the HDCP (that has absolutely NOTHING to do with quality) will have to be replaced despite it's full ability to display HD content.

IF said content uses the image constraint token, then yes, you will need HDCP, or your content will be downscaled to 960x540 (the same resolution as many "HD" XVID HDTV rips, mind you). It works the same way on a standalone HD-DVD or Blu-Ray player. Apple's implementation will doubtless work the same way as well, because it's mandated by the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray licensing groups.

Re:Strange...

[Corporate Troll]

Frankly, I'd like to know too.... My work XP Machine reports 1.22Gigs used right now, but I do have a lot of stuff open ;-)

In Linux, at least I know that superfluous RAM (="unused by programs") is used for caching. Which means: if you add another 256Meg of RAM, your Fedora/KDE machine will feel much better because the harddisk will be accessed less. The CPU usage could be explained by too much swapping (swapping both affects the CPU and the harddisk) Try it, RAM does miracles to overall system performance. Sure upgrading from 1Gig to 4Gig does a lot less, but I'm sure that 256Meg to 512Meg or 768Meg will help you greatly.

Vista SAVES on electrical usage.

[Vellmont]

I got Vista as a free trial a few days ago, and it's the first Microsoft OS I've run on a desktop that actually supports sleep/suspend mode properly. I keep my PC on 24/7 because I don't want to wait for it to boot to get some simple task done. Until now that's meant full power on at about 110 watts idle. But Vista actually supports sleep mode properly. Sleep mode, if you didn't know, turns off the processor, hard drive, and suspends everything to memory. It consumes about 10 watts. My PC comes back to a fully operational state in about 2-3 seconds. It's also on by default in Vista. Previously there's always been some component (usually my video card) that didn't support it properly.

So the dumb-ass greens should be ENCOURAGING Vista use, because there's a LOT of people that just keep their machines on 24/7 for the same reasons I do. Instead they get all caught up about DRM on HD-DVD and Blueray (which almost no one has anyway, so no one is going to throw away) and a little more power usage from Aero. If you don't like the increased power usage from Aero, turn it off.

Re:they forgot to mention

[TheNetAvenger]

that running a desktop in hardware accelerated 3d mode all the time also means more power consumption

Ya, that was all the speculation and theory; however, it doesn't hold water in reality.

There have been several reviews from Tom's to TweakVista that show that Vista on a laptop does not increase battery drain, and the Aero Glass only consumed 1 watt of power over having it turned off, and this is offset by the other power saving features of Vista.

I know this is SlashDot where facts don't matter, but do we have to become the Fox News of the Internet?

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:Strange...

[dbIII]

With ReadyBoost you should be able to haul the performance up significantly with a large memory stick.

Read the technical description of it on the MS site to cut through the hype - it is a horrible idea and won't help.