WTF? (from: Fred)
http://avc.blogs.com/a_vc/2005/07/wtf_1.html
This is my new title for anything that is really ridiculous in the Internet/technology world.
Today’s outrage is over Microsoft’s effort to give the content owners what they want and totally screw over all of us.
It’s called OPM and its a feature of the Longhorn operating system and it’s described here on Engadget by Stephen Speicher.
If for some reason you don’t want to click on the link, here are a few short snippets:
With Longhorn, Microsoftwill begin pushing opium. Well, technically it’s OPM. However, opium might be a good option for those livid that thevideo content being sent to their pristine 24-inch Dell LCD monitors is purposefully being “fuzzied” (more on thatlater).
…
So what will happen when you try to play premium content on your incompatible monitor? If you’re “lucky”, the contentwill go through a resolution constrictor. The purpose of this constrictor is to down-sample high-resolution content tobelow a certain number of pixels. The newly down-sampled content is then blown back up to match the resolution of yourmonitor. This is much like when you shrink a JPEG and then zoom into it. Much of the clarity is lost. The result is apicture far fuzzier than it need be.
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If OPM determines that your monitor falls below the securityrestrictions (i.e. isn’t DVI or HDMI w/HDCP), you could be greeted with a “polite message explaining that [yourmonitor] doesn’t meet security requirements.”
This is the first time I have heard of this OPM stuff and I need to do more research before I truly believe that Microsoft is really going to do something this dumb, but there it is.
All the great RSS stuff that is coming in Longhorn won’t help me a bit because if I have to live with this, I won’t be using Longhorn.
Oy.