WTF?
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, Microsoft
will begin pushing opium. Well, technically it’s OPM. However, opium might be a good option for those livid that the
video content being sent to their pristine 24-inch Dell LCD monitors is purposefully being “fuzzied” (more on that
later).
…So what will happen when you try to play premium content on your incompatible monitor? If you’re “lucky”, the content
will go through a resolution constrictor. The purpose of this constrictor is to down-sample high-resolution content to
below a certain number of pixels. The newly down-sampled content is then blown back up to match the resolution of your
monitor. This is much like when you shrink a JPEG and then zoom into it. Much of the clarity is lost. The result is a
picture far fuzzier than it need be.
…
If OPM determines that your monitor falls below the security
restrictions (i.e. isn’t DVI or HDMI w/HDCP), you could be greeted with a “polite message explaining that [your
monitor] 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.