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In reality, the only choice is for EVERYONE ***RIGHT NOW*** to start migrating AWAY from Microsoft products, and products that only work with Windows.

This is ESSENTIAL TO THE SURVIVAL OF OUR WORLD! Everything about us today is stored on Windows machines, for the most part. Our social security #s ( or whatever # your government may have turned you into ), bank information ( and balances ), EVERYTHING.

If this continues with a single system being so dominate as to FORCE hardware vendors to create their devices to a specific overly-complex closed-source, patented, and EXPENSIVE paradigm, we will have no choice but to defend technology ( and our future ) by mass-migrating Windows-based information onto other systems. Microsoft, of course, is working to prevent this with every ounce of muscle they have to spoof the issue as feature.

Unfortunately, this means the U.S. government will have to step up and do something. And it also means that people need to find a way to not be bought out by Microsoft. Of course, that isn't likely. And the U.S. governmental system is amongst the DUMBEST in the world, thanks to the limiting to a virtual 2-party system ( which prevents repairs to the system from ever occurring ).

Oh well, thankfully we can still hack the software up to pieces, reverse it, emulate certain must-haves, and then make the content work without MS interference... but that takes effort and time for each specific device or file format.

Which is an impossible feat, now. There are many millions(likely billions) of different devices and device variants, and there can be, literally, an infinite number of file formats. Meaning only one company in the world has the ability to do ANYTHING.. Microsoft.

I thought I managed to avoid Microsoft's influence on me ( and so long as I never have a hardware failure, I have ), but it seems that they have managed to hit me in the one place at which I can't respond... the hardware.

Writing a device driver for a closed-spec device is hard enough ( hell it's too hard to write a driver WITH specs, these days ), but adding in all of this encryption and other overhead to the hardware means my system will now be required to run on a Microsoft designed machine.

The only thing we can hope for, is that few hardware vendors play into the Vista thing. It certainly will be overly expensive for the smaller players ( who could face going out of business because of it ).

And what is to happen to Linux, Haiku, and the other operating systems ( which are mostly free and open sourced ), which do not have the resources to create a driver to operate on the latest MS processors ( made by Intel and others ), which require 2048-bit strong encryption for each instruction ( or data ) passed to the CPU.

I can understand the use for the technology, just not for general purpose computing. In that environment, it is the worst possible thing to occur! The idea of general purpose computing is to have a single machine that can be programmed to do anything you want it to do. Even if that includes having it not run Windows.

Microsoft is going to turn the PC industry into the Windows industry. And they aren't really hiding their intentions ( remember all of the "Windows on every PC" mantra of Microsoft's ???? ).

--The loon

EDIT: Some things for clarity.

Edited 2006-12-24 05:27