It's in the sentence you quote. Windows.

It's not illegal to have a monopoly in your own product. Hopefully I don't have to explain why.

They were convicted of abusing monopoly power in the OS/Browser/Office arena a while back, in case you might've missed that trial.

No, I didn't. Which is why I know what market they were actually found to be a monopoly in: x86-compatible PC OSes. Not office. Not browsers. Certainly not something as generic as "all operating systems"

Surely you agree Microsoft has a monopoly in the OS market.

Which OS market ? There's more than one.

The reason this is an abuse is quite simple. They are requiring ARM based tablets that have Windows 8 certification (take whatever you want from the intended meaning of that phrase) to require a non-user accessible key to certify or "sign" binaries on the ARM platform. Granted, Surface is Microsoft's product, but this will (and it has been WELL documented) apply to ALL ARM processor based tablets, even from third parties. (Want to play in Windows 8 Land? You're going to have to pay the gatekeeper, Microsoft, and not give users the SecureBoot Keys.

So you're arguing there won't be any ARM based tablets on the market soon capable of running anything except Windows 8 ? To be clear, you're predicting the death of Android on ARM tablets ?

All you have to do is look at the history of Microsoft to see that anything they do is geared towards not making a better product than their competitors, but defeating utterly their competitors and leaving them unable to continue.

Actually it's a struggle to think of any significant Microsoft product that hasn't won out by being more attractive to customers than the alternatives.

The problem that Microsoft's been facing for decades now is the fact that Linux is free. You can't under-price free, and you can't, in the current Intel architecture, make a suitable "Windows only" system anymore. (There are exceptions, and some driver support sucks, but for the most part, it's not like it was in the heyday of Microsoft's OS hot war against everyone else.)

It is stupidly trivial for Microsoft to create a standard for "Windows only" systems. It is trivial today, it was trivial ten years ago, it was trivial ten years before that. They didn't.

Linux has been free forever. Strangely, it hasn't displaced Windows. It hasn't even displaced MacOS. Indeed, the result has been the complete opposite. Clearly "free" means diddly squat to customers.

So forgive us for not believing Microsoft doesn't have a sinister plot in mind with this secureBoot code signing fungasm of theirs. History has proven that they are not to be trusted.... ever.

The only thing missing from your paranoid rant is the ridiculous "DOS ain't done" line.

Actually people should complain, Microsoft is abusing it's OS monopoly [...]

In what market are you proposing Microsoft has a monopoly ?

Not loading their publisher key is a blatant attempt to try to prevent people from running other OSes on that piece of hardware which is an abuse of their "dominant market share" and they need to be punished for it, preferably harshly

"Dominant market share" ? In what market ? Not tablet hardware. Not tablet OSes. Not tablet software. What market ?

No, it doesn't. It still does not say anything about the actual performance of the opera. Why would such a statement reflect on the actors/singers?

Yes, it does. Because you are disagreeing with the judgement.
Unless you meant something other than "I think X is incompetent even though Y has judged him as competent" by "evidence" ?

Based on my experience. And they could convince me by doing it competently.

So nothing and nothing, then.

I am curious who you think should be legislating and enforcing laws if not "the state", however.

If Windows had improved as much since 1991 as Linux has [...]

It did, it just started in 1982.

You have the kind of intellectual integrity that makes used car salesmen look like volunteers at a homeless shelter.

Law enforcement considers having bottled water in your car evidence of drug use and can tag you with possession of drug paraphenilia or use it as an excuse to strip your car down to the axles looking for drugs, then leave you with a disassembled car on the side of the road. A teenager was recently arrested and charged with possession of an explosive device because he doodled a comic book character who could shoot beams of energy out of his fists -- unfortunately, he also had an interest in engineering and electronics and his house contained many things that had been disassembled. No explosive material was found. He's still looking at life in prison.

Links ?

I don't mind paying taxes but I make less than 100,000 dollars a year and pay more than 50,000 a year in taxes by the time the Feds, State and local governments get through bleeding me.

Please show your working.

I'm not blaming the technology for anything, nor am I "confused" about anything.

I am pointing out that the argument about having no problems left to solve because the hardware is so awesome no software could run badly on it is fallacious. Sticking a "that we would approve" qualifier in is irrelevant, since it would make the statement true at any time, so long as you didn't "approve" software that ran badly.

The solution to our problem is to wait for the guy to retire. Fortunately that's probably going to be within 12 months.

By analogy: the fact that a panel might be incompetent to judge opera says exactly nothing about whether the opera was in fact performed well.

It does when you throw in an "evidence suggests the panel is incompetent to judge opera" in at the start.

My fundamental argument was, and is, that the state has not convinced me of its competence to judge drivers.

Based on what ? How _could_ they convince you ?

We don't have a choice about accepting code. We're (currently) structured as an internal service provider, so our responsibility is only the infrastructure. If people can't use that properly, that's not our problem.
The problem is the guy's development methods haven't changed in the thirty years he's been here. So according to him, SANs don't work, virtualisation doesn't work, indeed, any sort of shared infrastructure except network and power, it seems) is just something that makes his performance "inconsistent".
This person can't be moved, retrained, or relocated. They are politically untouchable. A couple of months back we lost tens of millions of dollars because his software fell over (in fairness, probably the biggest outage its ever had) and he barely even got a "please explain". His excuse ? "The new load balancers let too much traffic in, too fast.".
The point here is that while hardware may well be a done deal, there's a lot more work that needs to be done on the software side before there aren't any more problems to solve. Specific to infrastructure, the management tools around most aspects of managing infrastructure are still woeful.

Like I said, if there were _real_ data showing any particular brand of hard disk had failure rates in double-digit percentages, consumer protection groups would be all over it like a rash.

Every relevance you attach to anything is arbitrary.

No, no it's not.
For a basic example, food is quite objectively more relevant to survival than, say, your favourite TV show.

Correct. I wrote (and implied) nothing about drivers. My point was that states (at least those I have knowledge of) has not proven competent to judge them.

If you are saying nothing about drivers, how have you drawn a conclusion about whether the boogyman^W"state" has not proven competent to judge them ?
Is your fundamental argument here the "state" is not capable of judging anyone ? Should we be living in a lawless, free-for-all society ?

This means your selection of Games is dependent on the OS you use, which is fucking retarded in every sense of the word -- It's bad for gamers, it's bad for game devs, it's bad for hardware makers, it's bad for everyone but.... Microsoft.

Actually it's quite good for customers and developers because developers not having to worry about multi-platform QA means their time to market is quicker and their maintenance overheads are lower. The only people single-platform software is bad for are the ones without that platform.

Chip makers did. In fact, because of so much proprietary Windows market share, and resistance to architecture changes meant that the bloated x86 had to stick around FAR longer than it was actually needed. For fuck's sake man, we have interpretors on the chip just to emulate rarely used instructions! That's not an advance! That's Retardation!

Windows was multi-architecture from the early '90s. The market wasn't interested. Microsoft did nothing to hold anyone on to x86 and were ready to move whichever way the CPU architecture wars went.

It's blatantly wrong, but for the sake of argument, Windows consumes more cycles than BSD, Linux, and some OSX versions.

No, once you equalise for features and capabilities Windows is no heavier than the others (particularly OSX, which was far and away the heaviest OS on the market, especially in the 2000s - you literally could not buy a Mac that ran it well for *years* after its release - no version of Windows has ever been that bad).

Their decade long lag with IE6, and non adherence to standards is the scourge of every the web designer. We'd have had the web we have now, but Sooner and FASTER without MS's browser shenanigans, i.e., w/o IE.

Long before IE6 were IE3 and IE4, which killed Netscape and their dreams of a proprietary client-server WWW, while delivering better standards compliance, performance and feature set.

Even if I gave you this one too, the progress would have been made by someone else. If Alexander G. Bell would have died at birth, we'd have had the Telephone one hour later. We had incandescent bulbs two years before Edison figured out which gas to put in them, others were doing the same work, but he had more money -- Someone would have replaced the vacuum bulb with argon, there's only so many known elements. MS could have never existed and nothing of value would have been lost.

But they didn't, so it was Microsoft. Seriously, do you have a problem crediting Bell and Edison even though someone else would have eventually done it as well ?

MS's OS GUI wasn't vastly superior to OS2, X, or MacOS.

It certainly was to anything you'd find on X (which isn't even a GUI) until the 2000s when KDE and GNOME started to mature. Classic MacOS's instability and lack of decent multitasking, then OS X's atrocious performance and responsiveness until the mid-2000s and common availability of G5s/x86 made its GUI awful as well. So, for a good 7-odd years the Windows "GUI" _was_ easily the best on the market.

Were the solutions MS provided to be provided by a company other than MS, there would have been a chance that interoperability issues would have been resolved sooner and RISC-esque chipsets would likely have been more prevalent pulling less power for the same computations, thus consuming far less energy.

Laughable. Microsoft had Windows NT running on multiple RISC platforms in the '90s and no-one was interested. Why ? Because they were proprietary and/or hideously expensive.
You clearly have a chip on your shoulder and a desire to blame everything on Microsoft, which is why you're ignoring the real culprits for the (dubious) "crime" of constraining cross-platform software: the software developers.

There is no way that any new software we would accept could suck so hard that this hardware wouldn't serve it fast.

I'd like you to meet one of our (multiple) in-house applications that are single-threaded.
We (the Systems - ie: infrastructure - Architecture team) had to explain to the lead software developer (who has been here thirty years and is politically untouchable) why his brand new $100k, quad-socket, 32-core server was actually slower than his dual-core desktop at running his code.