UEFI Palladium reborn Nightmare.

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A very sloppy and misleading article from osnews.com.

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As Koaftder said, no one is forcing OEM's to put this stuff on boards.

UEFI isn't anything new, and MS has had enough trouble with the DOJ/Euro trade comm. to be this damned stupid, lol.

Most of the people chiming in shouting "BIG BROTHER" have no idea what it does or how it works.  I recommend reading some unbiased information, assuming you can find any in this recent wave of "omg M$ is taking over and locking out Linux" headlines.  The article on osnews.com was pure garbage, as are most of them these days.  Uninformed morons not seeing both sides of the coin - pro and con.

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UEFI/EFI isn't anything new, lol.  It's a decade old, Mac's have had it for ages.  I built an AMD based PC for a buddy not too long ago with an EFI "BIOS".  They are quite nice to use.

The sheer panic and outrage people have without at all looking into the facts that this stuff is not at all new boggles my mind.  The press is doing what they do best with this - blowing things out of proportion.  MS mentions UEFI and Win 8, they assume a Big Brother situation.

Microsoft simply isn't stupid enough to lock OS to hardware - they have had enough anti-trust/monopoly issues.  Linux may be a small market on the consumer side, but mobo manufacturers aren't just going to get into bed with MS outright at the expense of every other OS out there.  Locking out competing OS's would be a blatant offense, whether it was MS or the mobo makers, someone would get the book thrown at them.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unified_Extensible_Firmware_Interface
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_Microsoft_antitrust_case

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Hehe, I know you understand it just fine, Daedalus.  Most of us guys that are in the business know full well this will never fly.  It may make sense on MS's part - crush the other OS's, but on the hardware vendor end it's an absolutely ludicrous though.

Wasn't wagging my finger at you in the least, the amount of press that 10+ year old tech is causing is just staggering.  Everyone pulling the "Big Brother" quotes out of the hat seemingly won't even look into the tech behind this, lol.

I am not apologist for Microsoft, and they have done a lot of terrible anti-competitive things, but the idea they would pull this and the vendors would go along with it is absolutely preposterous.

MS cracks a fart in Europe, the trade commissions get uptight over there and start investigating them - rightly so, based on past MS business practices.  MS aren't stupid enough to push this - if they were they might as well earmark a few hundred million dollars for the anti-trust settlements that will most assuredly follow.