It's commonly believed that Vista's built-in DRM is a Bad Thing. I think it's bad because any time they put features in my machine that are meant to control me rather than letting me control the machine, I think the natural order of things is being undermined. Plus if the machine can do one thing I can't control, who says it can't be leveraged to do other nasty things to me?
It seems, though, that some people also blame Vista's DRM for other evils, including performance problems (I hadn't heard that). Ed Bott, who although he is a Microsoft fan in the way of a super-power user has in my experience always proved to be fair-minded, says it Ain't So:
Over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, in between two-hour daily workouts with a snow shovel, I read a remarkable paper called A Cost Analysis of Windows Vista Content Protection. And I wasn’t the only one. According to Technorati, the paper has so far been linked by more than 250 blogs, and Google News finds more than 100 citations to the paper in mainstream online publications.
Too bad it’s just so wrong about so many things.
In fact, I read the whole paper – all 10,224 words of it – seven times that week, and lost count of the number of exaggerations, half-truths, unsupported statements, and flat-out errors in it. It’s a big steaming pile of FUD, with just enough truth sprinkled on top to make it seem like there’s some substance underneath it.
I don't profess any expertise here, but it's interesting. There's more where that came from, and at Busting the FUD about Vista’s DRM.
