Yeah, the DRM shit has me almost ready to yank Vista out and go back to XP. I can't even record audio from my soundcard properly anymore. I used to be able to take vinyl records, play them through the soundcard and use SoundForge to record them but no program I've found will even allow me to record what's on the soundcard anymore.

I am a bit suprised that there haven't bee more blatant security holes exposed yet but I fear it's only a matter of time.

To the best of my knowledge there's not a direct impediment to this. The audio mechanism is different though, so new utilities may be required.

I'm not. I expect we'll see security holes, but they'll almost definitely be no more serious than the holes found regularly in Linux distributions and OS X. And considering that MS have a pretty top-notch security team (they kinda had to), fixes for these should be delivered well, too.

What i'm interested in is how far UAC, ASR, DEP etc. will go to lessen the real world impact of any vulnerabilities that are found.

So long as people don't disable them, I think most of those are considered pretty much proven approaches these days, and the Vista implementation of them looks pretty good.

It's also worth noting how secure a system Windows XP already is, through usability elements, considering that so many users run as Administrator by default. If you told a *nix person that you ran your normal sessions as root they'd most-likely be completely disgusted.

Very true.

It's unfortunate that the habbits of users and developers can be hard to break and Microsoft in the past have seemed to have leant in the way of compatibilty and convenience rather than good security practices. That attitude definately seems to be changing, but had there been a significant push to get people to run as a limited user back in the NT4 and early 2K days, then most applications available now would have been designed from the ground up with limited priveleges in mind.

They'd have broken backwards-compatibility. They broke quite a lot of backwards compatibility as it was - and look at the crap they're getting now for the compatibility issues in Vista, which aren't huge. MS's development is driven by what they think people/the market wants, which at this point was security, which Vista has in spades.

I find it interesting to compare this with OS X, which has a far more "designer knows best" mentality, making it a more consistent system so long as you're willing to adhere to the Apple Way of Life.

Considering Apple's stance on the matter as a pretty closed platform, it was never surprising of them to do.

Yeah, I just think it's interesting to compare and contrast the styles of product you get from each approach. Linux distributions are another good one to look at for that.

Something tells me there is a driver problem. There are virtually no "complete" audio-card drivers for Vista yet; in fact, significant percentages of people with sound cards can't even get 5.1/7.1 sound or much sound at all. Vista completely altered the way Windows handles sound (for the better, from a completely non-DRM standpoint) which has put the normally balky hardware-software driver writers into a fit. They've been caught unprepared (there's an extensive blame game going on as well), and word has it that they're being slowed down by multiple core-level bugs in their code that went unnoticed previously due to Windows' friendly audio habits.

People write bad code, bad code fails to work. Microsoft blamed. Story at 11.

Re: Falling into the Vista trap
 

that system was bad balanced. the ram brakes the cpu too much and your craphics card is too slow. Did you play new games with that PC or office?
i think with that less ram even my PC would be faster even my cpu is much slower
My System:
1,7ghz p1 with 1gb ram 128mb radeon 9800pro

i tried to run a vista benchmark tool to test if my pc is fit for vista and it didnt even start