A variation of your car analogy: I buy a car, but I decide that I don't like the tires that come with the car. Can I get a refund of the cost of those tires if I choose to use different ones?

Check the dreamwidth.org post I cited - mjg calls out (in the comments) that there IS a challenge that the OEM needs to include the distro's cert in the box, but that doesn't mean that Linux is locked out - the Linux distro just needs to work with the OEM to ensure that the cert for the distro is included in one of the set of certs that is included in the box:

"Re: Is there any way for the end-user to load their own keys?
Date: 2011-09-24 02:10 am (UTC)
From: mjg59
Not inherently. It's actually reasonably hard to do - inserting new keys requires that those keys themselves be signed by the private half of one of the keys in the KEK database, so you'd need to give your key to someone who *does* have an entry there (either the OEM or Microsoft), have them sign it and then pass that into the variable database"

I'm not saying that there aren't challenges, but it's NOT impossible. "Requires that the Linux distribution owner work with the OEM" is far from "locked out".

Where did they say that? What I read in all the excerpts was that the competing OS needed to built according to the rules that Intel defined when they defined UEFI secure boot.

That's not "impossible" - According to this, it should be possible. And this says it should take about a week's worth of work for any distro to support it.

That's FAR from "impossible".

I'll bite Mr. AC (I shouldn't, but I will): References to Microsoft "[pulling] this crap everyday and everywhere"? Preferably something within the past 1-2 years?

If you're going to make a strong claim like that, you had better be able to back it up.

To add a worksheet in Excel 2007, I go to the bottom of the document (where the worksheet tabs are listed). The one on the far right has a tooltip which says "Insert Worksheet (Shift+F11)". That seems much more efficient than the "home/cells/format" thingy you described.

We're not talking about Exchange here, we're talking about *Windows*. Steven Sinofsky, the head of Windows is notorious about not saying anything about features before they're fully baked.

You've just described the memory allocator used in Windows 1.0 back in 1984 (no, that's not a typo). For an OS designed for a machine without any form of virtual memory, and one which needed to run on machines with 256K of RAM (again, not a typo) it was a pretty good solution. But the memory management solutions used by modern operating systems are many orders of magnitude better (demand paging trumps lock/unlock for overall resource allocation). Plus you'd have to deal with the apps that call "give me the real memory" and never release it back to the OS.

And of course apps would do this routinely because they don't care what their bad behavior does to the other apps on the system, as long as their app works just fine.

Firefox is also moving to a silent update model. And I'll bet they mess it up too.

The Black Viper list is pretty good, but the reality is that from Win7 on, the list of OS services that's enabled is the set which won't break something (if you read Black Viper's list they point out what breaks with each service disabled).

And I've not yet figured out how to convince Google Chrome to stop auto-updating (and I don't want to stop flash from auto-updating, flash and pdf are the two biggest vectors for malware out there). I just wish their auto-updaters respected the user and recognized that they should. Larry Osterman wrote an article about this a couple of years ago: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2007/08/20/applet-mitigations-updaters.aspx

Trigger started services were introduced in Windows 7, this isn't new. I just wish people were taking advantage of them (I'm looking at you Google chrome and Adobe with your long running processes that do nothing but check to see if there's an update).