Summary: Microsoft’s decision to remove support for playing DVD movies in Windows 8 has caused some confusion. If the VLC media player can provide DVD support for free, why can’t Microsoft? For starters, Microsoft isn’t French.
Microsoft announced this week that Windows 8 will not support playback of DVD movies unless you explicitly add software that supports that feature.
The economic reasons for doing so are compelling (see Microsoft’s follow-up FAQ for details), but it’s also a potentially disruptive move for some Windows enthusiasts. So it’s not surprising that some of the initial reactions have been heated and even angry.
I’ll look at the big numbers and walk through the math in a follow-up post. But I wanted to interrupt the discussion here to answer a question that several people have asked.
“Microsoft says the cost of DVD playback adds up to several dollars,” the argument goes. “But I can download the VLC player for Windows and get DVD playback for free. How come VLC can do it and Microsoft can’t?”
Welcome to the wonderful world of software licensing, where today we get to see a real-world example of the differences between commercial software and free software published under an open source license.
Any commercial product—hardware or software—that plays back DVDs has to have a license to a handful of software components that are protected by patents. In particular, you need access to the following:

• An MPEG-2 decoder. The licensing rights for the MPEG-2 standard are made up of a pool of patents contributed by their inventors. The pool itself is managed by MPEG LA, which collects and distributes royalties on behalf of the patent owners, under a master license agreement. Those rights cost $2 per device. The maker of a cheap DVD player sold at Costco pays $2 per unit for the MPEG-2 rights. Microsoft pays An OEM PC maker who licenses Windows from Microsoft must pay $2 in MPEG-2 licensing fees to enable DVD playback in every copy of Windows 7 Home Premium, Professional, and Ultimate. [Edited to clarify payment requirements]
  
• Dolby Digital audio support. This decoder, which is required for DVD movie playback, has to be licensed from Dolby Laboratories, Inc. The licensing schedule isn’t public, but in its annual report for 2011 Dolby revealed that it collected $124 million in licensing fees from Microsoft for the year, with most of that revenue generated from Windows 7. My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest that Dolby gets at least 50 cents and as much as a dollar for every Windows PC sold.

Microsoft, Apple, Panasonic, Sony, Samsung, and other companies that make DVD players (hardware and software) have to pay those license fees for every unit they deliver to a customer, which is why you don’t see very many free DVD players.
The noteworthy exception is the VLC media player, which proudly bills itself as “a free and open source cross-platform multimedia player and framework.” It explicitly lists DVD as a supported format.
How can that be?
Well, on its “Legal concerns” page the makers of VLC open with a proud declaration: “VideoLAN is an organization based in France,” and “French law … is the only one to be applicable.”
If you skip to the bottom of the English portion of the page, you see why that matters. This is VideoLAN’s argument:

Patents and codec licenses
Neither French law nor European conventions recognize software as patentable (see French section below).
Therefore, software patents licenses do not apply on VideoLAN software.

The two software libraries that enable DVD and Blu-ray playback in VLC are libdvdcss and libaacs, both of which get their own legal justifications (the bold-faced words are in the original):

libdvdcss is a library that can find and guess keys from a DVD in order to decrypt it.
This method is authorized by a French law decision CE 10e et 9e sous­sect., 16 juillet 2008, n° 301843 on interoperability.
NB: In the USA, you should check out the US Copyright Office decision that allows circumvention in some cases.
VideoLAN is NOT a US-based organization and is therefore outside US juridiction. [sic]

[…]
libaacs is a research project and has an interoperability purpose (see above point).
Moreover, libaacs DOES NOT provide any decryption key. It is based on the official public AACS specification only.

Update: Via Twitter, VideoLAN notes that “libaacs is not yet shipped with VLC. We are waiting for remarks from the French DRM authority.” Their comments include a link to this article (English translation).
I’m sure if one were to ask a lawyer for one of the patent holders in the MPEG-2 or AACS pools, one would get a very spirited argument about the validity of those arguments. That argument would probably invoke the anti-circumvention provisions of the United States’ Digital Millennium Copyright Act. But VLC can get away with it primarily because it is a nonprofit organization based outside the reach of the United States legal system and not worth pursuing.
A maker of commercial DVD playback hardware or software would be sued in a heartbeat if they tried to distribute products based on those freeware projects. They’d also run afoul of the General Public License if they tried to include the code in their closed-source, commercial products.
But the VLC project is hardly a rogue player. In fact, as I noted in a 2010 post, Microsoft has provided financial support for VLC:

Anyone can write a media player for Windows and can build in support for whatever media formats they want. No one is “required” to use Windows Media Player—exactly the opposite….
One alternative is VLC, which I have praised before…. In an e-mail to me, one of the core developers of VLC specifically praised Microsoft last year for its assistance, noting that “Microsoft … funded our Windows 7 compatibility program participation.”

Any OEM that includes a DVD player in a new Windows 8 PC will undoubtedly include a licensed DVD Player, such as the Metro version of PowerDVD that CyberLink announced at CES earlier this year. (If PowerDVD is smart, they’ll include both the Metro and desktop versions with Windows 8.) You’ll also have an assortment of commercial programs to choose from.
The good news is that as a consumer you can count on the continued availability of VLC as a free DVD (and Blu-ray) playback alternative if you don’t want to pay for the Media Center Pack. And the project continues to evolve. Earlier this week, VideoLAN boasted via its official Twitter account: “by the time Windows 8 is out, we will have even better Blu-Ray support!”

via ZDnet > http://www.zdnet.com...h-results-river

While it's technically a regression, and while it will surely make those of us who remember having to install DVD support on Linux from third-party repositories smile, it's still a major change and a sign of things to come: Windows 8 will ship without support for DVD and Blu-ray playback.

Back in the day, you had to manually enable DVD playback after installing Linux. Distributions based out of the US were unable to include the required libdvdcss (or libdvdcss2), so users had to manually install the package afterwards. Smaller distributions, or those based outside of the US, were more liberal with including libdvdcss. The end result was loads of articles on the web detailing how to enable DVD playback support on Linux. It was a ritual of some sort.
In a way, it's kind of poetic justice that Windows users will now have to jump through the same hoops. To cut costs, and since its use was declining anyway, Windows 8 will ship without support for DVD and Blu-ray playback. To enable it, you have to buy/install Windows Media Center, or rely on one of the many third party solutions. The same also applies to support for DBV-T/S, ISDB-S/T, DMBH, and ATSC.
"Globally, DVD sales have declined significantly year over year and Blu-ray on PCs is losing momentum as well. Watching broadcast TV on PCs, while incredibly important for some of you, has also declined steadily," Microsoft details, "These traditional media playback scenarios, optical media and broadcast TV, require a specialized set of decoders (and hardware) that cost a significant amount in royalties."
This should reduce the cost of a Windows license, and considering Windows 8 has a tablet-focus, it makes sense not to force OEMs to pay for something tablets won't have anyway (optical drives). It's a good thing for me - I haven't had an optical drive in any of my PCs for years, and I wouldn't be surprised if the same applies to more of you. Just ask yourself: when was the last time you really used your optical drive?
It's also a sign of something larger within Microsoft: the company has become incredibly willing to cut cruft from their operating system, even when it comes to support for hardware. This is a good sign, since if there's one thing that's held Microsoft and Windows back, it's that.
As far as the entire industry goes, it's obvious that optical media are on their way out. Apple never even supported Blu-ray to begin with, and with more and more laptops being sold without an optical drive, it only makes sense to start phasing it out. Let's face it - it's never been a particularly good storage medium, in terms of capacity, reliability, and speed.
So, raise a cup of coffee, and good riddance, I say.

via osnews.com > http://www.osnews.co...Blu-ray_support

System Center 2012 was released was released yesterday and as a result all System Center 2012 products are available now! You can read more about the Microsoft Private Cloud here: http://www.microsoft...-cloud/new.aspx and you can download the Microsoft Private cloud Evaluation software form the TechNet Evaluation Center: http://technet.micro...r/hh505660.aspx



Microsoft also created a System Center 2012 track on Microsoft Virtual Academy. Currently there are 2 courses. But new courses will be added in the near future.

Start learning System Center 2012 now: https://www.microsof...ystemCenter2012

if like me you are not able to attend MMS 2012 in Las Vegas, and you want to see what's going on, you can review the keynotes here.



plus you can review many of the sessions as they are added right here.

watching these you'll see the Windows Server 8 is renamed to Windows Server 2012 for example !



plenty to see, well worth watching

cheers
niall

Microsoft today shipped patches for at least 11 documented security vulnerabilities, including one that’s already being hit with “limited, targeted attacks.”

The vulnerability under attack — now fixed today with the MS12-027 bulletin — exists in Windows Common Controls and can be exploited to launch remote code execution attacks if a user simply surfs to a malicious website. The vulnerability is caused when the MSCOMCTL.OCX ActiveX control, while being used in Internet Explorer, corrupts the system state in such a way as to allow an attacker to execute arbitrary code.

Microsoft is calling on Windows users to apply this bulletin as a priority because of the high-risk of code execution attacks.
The company is also calling special attention to MS12-023, which addresses at least 5 flaws in the Internet Explorer browser.

The most severe vulnerabilities could allow remote code execution if a user views a specially crafted webpage using Internet Explorer. An attacker who successfully exploited any of these vulnerabilities could gain the same user rights as the current user. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.

Windows users are also urged to apply a third “critical” bulletin (MS12-024), which covers a “critical” vulnerability that allows remote code execution if a user or application runs or installs a specially crafted, signed portable executable (PE) file on an affected system.
This month’s Patch Tuesday batch also includes:

• MS12-025 (Critical) – A privately reported vulnerability in Microsoft .NET Framework. The vulnerability could allow remote code execution on a client system if a user views a specially crafted webpage using a web browser that can run XAML Browser Applications (XBAPs). Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights. The vulnerability could also allow remote code execution on a server system running IIS, if that server allows processing ASP.NET pages and an attacker succeeds in uploading a specially crafted ASP.NET page to that server and then executes the page, as could be the case in a web hosting scenario. This vulnerability could also be used by Windows .NET applications to bypass Code Access Security (CAS) restrictions.
  
• MS12-026 (Important) — Two privately reported vulnerabilities in Microsoft Forefront Unified Access Gateway (UAG). The more severe of the vulnerabilities could allow information disclosure if an attacker sends a specially crafted query to the UAG server.
  
• MS12-028 (Important) — This security update resolves a privately reported vulnerability in Microsoft Office and Microsoft Works. The vulnerability could allow remote code execution if a user opens a specially crafted Works file. An attacker who successfully exploited this vulnerability could gain the same user rights as the current user. Users whose accounts are configured to have fewer user rights on the system could be less impacted than users who operate with administrative user rights.

via > http://www.zdnet.com...nt;feature-roto