WD debuts DRM’d Harddrive (*hiss*)

DRM seems to be the popular industry buzz acronym at present regardless whether it inflame users or not. This recent trend of pandering to content providers over end users is both reprehensible and irresponsible from a corporate and moral prospective. A few weeks ago, Western Digital released on the unsuspecting world an external harddrive with buit in DRM.

I am a huge fan of Western Digital HDDs, and have bought 5 hard drives from them recently, however in such a competitive market, smart consumers have plenty of choice and will simply turn their noses up at a product that restricts their abilities. Wired posted that the SAMBA mode works properly, its only the client software that provides restrictions of Media files.

UPDATE: A whole community hell bent on replacing the official firmware with a F/OSS linux version has sprung up. Whilst I dislike products that force DRM on the consumer, I do love it when F/OSS projects are created on the back of them (e.g. iPOD linux)

Free (legal) Vista? .. how can I loose?

Microsoft have (quietly) started up a Feedback Program supported free version of Windows Vista Ultimate as well as other ‘popular’ software including Microsoft Office Ultimate 2007, Microsoft Money Premium, Microsoft Student with Encarta Premium 2008, or Microsoft Streets and Trips 2008. In order to qualify, you must agree to either one or both of the following programs:

“The survey feedback program. When you join the survey feedback program, you’ll be invited to take a survey on a regular schedule. If the survey arrives at a time where you are busy, you skip that one and take the next one instead. You will not receive more than a survey every two weeks.

The automated feedback program. When you choose to participate, most of the work is done behind the scenes, with no additional effort, time requirement, or inconvenience to you. Occasionally, we might send you an invitation to participate in a survey or another feedback program to get additional information about your use of computers but, in general, you only hear from us if we make significant changes to our data collection method or if we want to offer another feedback program to you that you might be interested in.”

Source

I have not had a chance to go through the program to see if there are any limitations other than periodic usage reports / surveys from Microsoft however if you are interested in upgrading to any other these pieces of software, it might be worth considering as a ‘demo.’ This idea is not a new one, versions of Microsoft Office have had voluntary opt-in usage statistics since Office 2000 as well as MSN Messenger. I don’t know about you, but the prospect of my operating system sending back ‘anonymous’ usage reports to a third party does not fill me with confidence.

MiniWin – A Windows Kernel in 4Mb

Whilst most of the details of the upcoming ‘Windows 7′ (or Blackcomb / Vienna depending on which codename MS are currently using) are still shrouded in Mystery. Microsoft recently revealed they intend to power Windows 7 with a brand new minimalistic core. At present Microsoft support a wide range of kernels across their products and it must be resource consuming maintaining all these codebases. After all, its not just desktop kernels but Mobile and PPC based systems as well:

‘Longhorn Based’ – Server 2008, Vista

‘Whistler Based’ – Server 2003, Windows XP, XP embedded, XP Media Center 2003/4/5, Tablet PC, XP Fundamentals, Windows Home Server

‘NT 5 / Asteroid Based’ – Windows 2000 Sever / Professional

‘Talisker Based’ – PPC OS, Smartphone OS

Magneto Based’ – Windows Mobile 5

‘Crossbow / Yamazaki Based’ – Windows Mobile 6

So the idea is to consolidate all supported architectures into one makes perfect sense in terms of longer term support. Of course, in order to be fit for purpose, the MiniKernel needs to be so flexible as to be used for embedded mobile applications as well as desktop AND enterprise grade server applications. The idea of a streamlined, optimised kernel is a welcome departing from Vista’s Bloat, I just hope Microsoft do not embed DRM into this mini kernel and bloat it unnecessarily.

The new kernel is purportedly to be 4Mb in size and uses only 100 files. Of course this precludes any GUI, however when run in a virtual machine with only 40Mb of RAM, the kernel (running a basic http server) used just 33 MB of the allocated RAM and booted in 20 seconds. This is a project fairly early in its life, and short-term will only make things worse (by adding yet another code-base) however it will be interesting to see what other optimisations can be made. Of course this kernel does not include all the parts needed for a fully fledged operations system like a graphical hardware layer and proper driver loading, however the implementation of a networking stack is promising. It shows what can be done when not implementing a broken IPv6 system that almost no-one presently uses..

It is one thing to show a prototype in an idealised virtual machine (ahem ReactOS :p) and quite another to provide an infrastructure that allows heterogeneous hardware support, however I am very interested in this new approach and like many others shall be watching this closely.

As a brief aside, I just want to say that my dig at ReactOS was precisely that, a playful dig. The project is one I have been following since 0.2.x and the work the guys are doing over there is extremely impressive, implementing an NT based F/OSS clone is alot of work (it too Microsoft ~15 years to get there after all!)