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.