Technology Tales

Today was to have been the last day of my Office 2007 trial but I headed over to Amazon.co.uk at the start of the week to bag both Office Home and Student 2007 and Outlook 2007. Both arrived yesterday and I set to ridding my system of all things Office before adding the new software. So the 2007 trial had to go as did Office XP and any reference to Office 97; Office XP was an upgrade. From this, you might think that I am on a five year upgrade cycle for Office and it certainly does appear that way though Office 95 was the first version that I had on a PC; it came with my then more than acceptable Dell Dimension XPS133 (Pentium 133, 16MB RAM, 1.6GB hard drive… it all looks so historical now).

Returning to the present, the 2007 installations went well and all was well on my system. Curiously, Microsoft seems to label the components of Office Home and Student “non-commercial use”. I accept that the licence is that way inclined but they could be a little more subtle than to go emblazoning the application title bars with the said wording. I suppose that it is minor irritation when you consider that you are allowed a three machine licence for what are the full versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint and OneNote. It must be the presence of OpenOffice on the scene that is inducing such benevolence.

Curiously, Outlook isn’t included in Office Home and Student, hence my getting the full version of the application separately. That means that there is no nefarious wording about the purpose for which it should be used. While on the subject of Outlook, my purge of previous Office versions thankfully didn’t rid my system of the PST files that I was using with Outlook 2007’s predecessors. In fact, the new version just picked up where its predecessors had left off without any further ado. As I have been getting used to the new interface, changed from Outlook 2002 but not as dramatically as the likes of Word, Excel or PowerPoint, there is certain amount of continuation from what has gone before in any case. The three-pane window is new to me as I never encountered Outlook 2003 and that may explain why it look a little time to find a few things. An example is that all calenders appear in the same place when I had expected the association between calenders and their PST files to be retained. Nevertheless, it is not at all a bad way to do things but it does throw you when you first encounter it. Its RSS feed reader is a nice touch as are the translucent pop-ups that appear when a new message arrives; that tells you the title and the sender so you can decide whether to read it without so much as having to look at it and interrupt what you are doing.

In a nutshell, all seems well with Office 2007 on my machine and I am set up go forward without the headache of an upgrade cycle since I have recommenced from a clean slate. I have heard of some problems with Office 2007 on Windows Vista but I am running Windows XP and I have had no problems so far. In fact, I plan to sit out the Vista saga for a while in order to see how things develop and, who knows, I might even not bother with Vista at all and go for Vienna, its replacement due in 2009/2010, since XP support is to continue for good while yet.

At work, we still use Windows 2000 on our desktop and laptop PC’s. This may (or may not) surprise you but the XP upgrade seems to have been thought a premature move and Vista turned up later than might have been expected. Now that Microsoft is winding down support for Windows 2000, thoughts have started to turn to a Vista upgrade, but the realisation soon dawned that a move to Vista was a major one and it now looks as if we will be on Windows 2000 for a little while yet, until 2008 at least.

I, too, have Windows 2000 lurking around at home as a testing platform, not a work copy I hasten to add, and software vendors increasingly are not supporting the operating system any more. Symantec is one of these with the 2006 versions of its products being the last ones to support Windows 2000. Initially, I was left with the impression that Kaspersky was the same, but this does not seem to be the case. While the open-source community can continue their supply of productivity applications such as OpenOffice, the GIMP and so on, it is the security side that is of most concern as regards the future of Windows 2000. That said, its successors are not the prime targets for cracking but shared code could mean that it falls foul of the same exploits.

I have yet to notice it with the hardware that I am using, but hardware advances may yet put paid to Windows 2000 like they did to members of the Windows 9x line, especially when you consider that the operating system dates from 1999. Then again, you may find that you don’t need the latest hardware, so this might not affect you. This is not all that unreasonable given that the pace of technological progress is less frenzied these days than it was in the nineties when Windows 95 was more or less out of date by the turn of the millennium. Having the gold OEM version of Windows 95 as the basis for a Windows 9x upgrade treadmill meant that my move into the world of NT-based operating systems was a clean break with a full version of my new operating system and not its upgrade edition.

Nevertheless, there remains a feeling that Windows 2000 is being cut off prematurely and that it could last a while longer with a bit of support, even if there is a late nineties feel to the thing. After all, Windows 2000 probably still supports a lot of what people want to do and without the Big Brother tendencies of Vista too.

If it isn’t enough that Vista’s licensing legalese has being causing raised blood pressure, its use of DRM technology is arousing passionate outbursts and outpourings of FUD. The fact that DRM has been part of the Windows has been included in Windows since the 1990’s does nothing to quell the storm. One thing that needs to be pointed out is that the whole furore entails the delivery of protected content to consumers. Microsoft would no doubt approve of the line that if there was no protected content, then there would be no need to worry. However, there is a sizeable number of people who do not trust Microsoft to keep to its word and are making their feelings known.

The embodiment of the issue is Microsoft’s incorporation of HDCP into 64-bit Vista. It is an Intel standard and it’s already on the market but users already are having bad experiences with it. The problems surround the need to ensure that protected video is not intercepted while a movie is being played and this involves the hardware as much as the software. The result is you need a compatible monitor that will have the correct inputs so that DRM can be employed. Some also suggest that this is not the end of the matter as regards hardware compatibility and the list can grow long enough that a whole new PC looks a good idea.

At the heart of this debate is a paper written by Peter Gutmann of the University of Auckland, in which the consequences of Microsoft’s implementation are examined. The idea of a system with an alternative agenda to that which you have is hardly enthralling: neither using CPU time to monitor DRM and the locking down hardware are particularly attractive. Such is the exposure that this article has received that even Microsoft has had to respond to it. The point that they try to make is that decoding of protected content occurs in a sandbox and does not affect anything else that might be going on in the system. Unfortunately for them, many of those adding comments to the piece take the chance to launch a broadside on the company; some of the vitriol is certainly successful when it comes to trying to put me off Vista. To Microsoft’s credit, the negative comments remain but it far from helps their attempted rebuttal of Gutmann.

The main fuel for the negativity is not Gutmann’s paper per se but lack of trust in Microsoft itself, all of this in spite of its Trustworthy Computing initiative. The question goes like this: if the company uses DRM for video and audio, where else could it use the technology? The whole licensing debate also furthers this and it is on this point that the fear, uncertainty and doubt really goes into overdrive, no matter how much effort is expended by people like Ed Bott on debunking any myths. Users generally do not like software taking on itself to decide what can and cannot be done. Personally, I have past experience of Word’s habits of this nature and they were maddening: trying to produce my doctoral thesis with it went OK until I tried pulling the whole thing together using a master document; I backtracked and made PRN files for each chapter so that it wouldn’t change; LaTeX would never have done this….

What is the point of all of this DRM? It looks as if Microsoft clearly feels that it is necessary to pitch the PC as an entertainment content delivery device in order to continue growing their revenues in the home users market. Some would take this idea even further: that it is control of the entertainment industry that Microsoft wants. However, in order to do so, they have gone with strong DRM when there exists a growing backlash against the technology. And then there’s the spectre of the technology getting cracked. In fact, Alex Ionescu has found a potential way to fool the Protected Media Path (called Protected Video Path in a ComputerWorld Security article) into working with unsigned device drivers. Needless to say given the furore that has been generated, but there are others who are more than willing to take the idea of cracking Vista DRM even further. A recent remark from a senior Microsoft executive will only encourage this.

I must admit that I remain unconvinced by the premise of using a PC as my only multimedia entertainment device. Having in the past had problems playing DVD’s on my PC, I nowadays stick to using a standalone DVD player to do the honours. And I suspect that I’ll do the same with HD video should I decide to do watch it; it’s not that high on my list of priorities. In fact, I would be happier if Microsoft made a versions of Vista with and without protected HD capability and they do: 32-bit Vista will not play protected HD video. And it avoids all the hackles that have caused so much controversy too, allowing an easier upgrade in the process. The downsides are that the security model isn’t as tough as it is in the 64-bit world and that maximum memory is limited to 4 GB, not an issue right now it more than likely will become one. If you are keen on Vista, the 32-bit option does give you time to see how the arguments about the 64-bit world run. And if hardware will catch up. Me, I’ll stick with XP for now.