Get outspoken insights and expert advice on the products and companies that define today's tech landscape, from a source who knows these technologies inside and out.
Ed Bott is an award-winning technology writer with more than two decades' experience writing for mainstream media outlets and online publications.
When people complain about the redesigned user interface in Windows Vista, the poster child for the “it’s too complicated” crowd is the Network and Sharing Center. The most common complaint? It takes too many clicks to access proerties for a network connection. Here's how to set up an efficient alternative interface.
Windows Vista was released to manufacturing a year ago next week, and landed on retail shelves exactly nine months ago today. At the time, Vista head honcho Jim Allchin predicted that the number of security patches required for this version of Windows would go way down compared to its predecessor. So, was he right?
After reading through hundreds of comments to last week's digital media ethics poll, I've come to the realization that my readers are much more rational and reasonable than the entertainment industry. Overall, I see plenty of common sense in those responses. When it comes to sharing digital music, for example, a large number of you think it's perfectly OK and even good for the industry. Not surprisingly, that stand is at odds with the RIAA.
The voting in my digital media ethics poll is now closed, and your votes have made one conclusion crystal clear. The overwhelming majority of you believe that if you buy a music CD, you're buying the rights to play back that performance any way you want, on any media, at any bit rate, as long as it's for your personal use. According to the RIAA, you don't have a right to do any of that stuff.
The response to the digital media ethics poll I posted earlier this week has been overwhelming. Based on these results, thne RIAA and its allies are clearly losing the battle of ideas. Here's a summary of the voting so far, along with links so you can add your opinion.
Help me wrestle with some ethical questions related to digital media. We can all agree that it's easy to make perfect copies of digital media, and that there's no such thing as an unbreakable copy protection scheme. But the fact that you can do something doesn't necessarily mean you should. Does it?
Sometimes you find fascinating little tidbits of Microsoft news buried in obscure places, tossed in as throwaway remarks. Today’s case in point comes from a post at an obscure Microsoft blog, which inadvertently answers the question of why UAC fixes won't be included in Vista SP1 and raises a few more questions as well.
This is the third and final installment of my series pointing out some of the significant errors in a widely read critique of Windows Vista's content protection design. If you think you're getting accurate, unbiased information about Vista from Micrsoft's most vocalcritic, think again. Today's examples show how selective qoting of Microsoft's specs left out important details, and why Nvidia graphics cards are much more powerful than you think. Oh, and before you decide to buy any hardware based on someone's recommendation, you might want to ask whether they've actually used it first.
Windows Vista includes a new set of features that allow playback software to work with protected media, especially high-definition content. This DRM infrastructure is bitterly controversial, and it's given rise to an enormous amount of misinformation. In part 2 of this three-part series, I continue my detailed examination of the errors, dostortions, and untruths in the most widely quoted paper on the subject, written by New Zealand researcher Peter Gutmann. I was stunned to find that some of the assertions in his epic paper are directly contradicted by his own sources, and that two of his key stats are literally made up. See the proof for yourself.
Self-described "professional paranoid" Peter Gutmann of the University of Auckland has become the most widely quoted source of information on DRM and content protection in Windows Vista. The trouble is, Gutmann's work is riddled with factual errors, distortions, contradictions, and outright untruths, and his conclusions are equally wrong. In this three-part series, I'll show you why Gutmann's outrageous and inflamatory arguments don't stand up to close scrutiny.