Interesting that accessibility was not a theme (watched the online video, not the presentation). I'm interested to see what some low-sight folk might use this. Go shopping and have all the product labels magnified 20-30x?
Excellent point, I've never seen that. The whole structure of election has a lot of variation from place to place, which is a major stumbling block for people who want simple, universal technological solutions.
And I forgot write-ins! You don't even have a fixed set of candidates in a given election!
I'm also curious as to what is tiresome running as a regular user. I'm a developer and run two users (standard/admin) without any issue. Only issue I run into is having to switch to the admin user to run brew.
Remember when Apple made a delusional commercial that mocked UAC [1] yet here we are over 15 years later and it looks like Microsoft was the one that got it right. Under Windows you can have multiple windows open each running as different users.
Been doing a lot of internal documentation with Gilab pages, Sphinx, and Myst (markdown for Sphinx). There are pre-built templates for the Continuous Integration for rebuilding the pages.
Worked at an OEM and Microsoft charged a license fee for every processor out the door regardless of whether the system had DOS, Novell, or nothing at all installed.
They would force such a licence agreement on every OEM, small or large. There was a lot more dirty tricks involved to monopolize the market. Look up BeOS history, for example. The OEMs installed BeOS on a second partition, and they could not show it in the bootloader, because of these agreements.
Microsoft and Bill Gates built their position on pure evil.
Microsoft was a big player, and certainly had clout, but the word "force" is inaccurate.
To answer the grand-parent-post, they got a license per CPU because the retailers _agreed_ to that model.
MS would argue that every cpu sold ran an MS operating system (legal or illegal) so licensing the CPU made it cheaper for legit users (ie lower price) and pirate users ultimately paid as well.
This left other OSs out in the cold but the number of actual legit users installing something else was a rounding error.
Shops could _choose_ to just sell dos or windows when the customer wanted it, but they paid a higher price via that model, so few (if any) shops went that way.
MS certainly played lots of dirty tricks but OEM pricing is not really dirty, it's just sensible business when you have that sort of market dominance and your software is pirated so heavily.
That's not an unusual business position. You see it everyday with places that sell coke or Pepsi but not both.
That the choice for retailers is an obvious one is neither here nor there. They had a choice and clearly they wanted to sell Windows, so the choice is obvious.
You might not like their choice, you might not like Windows, but this is bog standard business stuff.
Companies in a monopoly position are more limited in what they are allowed to do.
Something that might seem like a usual business practice to a small fish like you or me, might be illegal for a monopoly.
Microsoft's lawyers tried using your argument to get partial summary judgement in Caldera v. Microsoft. They lost, and they lost the appeal. Here's Caldera's claim, quoting the summary in the US District Court judgement:
> In addition to its improper vaporware and FUD campaigns, Caldera alleges that Microsoft also forced OEMs away from DR DOS 5.0 by what plaintiff refers to as the "licensing triple-whammy," which refers to (1) per processor licenses, (2) minimum commitments subject to forfeiture, and (3) increased license duration. Per processor licensing agreements required an OEM to pay Microsoft a royalty on every machine the OEM shipped regardless whether the machine contained MS-DOS or a different operating system. This is in contrast to a per system licensing agreement, which required OEMs to pay a royalty on only those computers shipped with MS-DOS installed. The use of per processor agreements is argued by plaintiff to be Microsoft's most effective single weapon against DR DOS. Plaintiff alleges that DRI had no realistic chance to license DR DOS to OEMs under a per processor license with Microsoft. It would make no sense for an OEM to install DR DOS when it had already paid for MS-DOS on every machine. Microsoft contends that OEMs were free to depart from the per processor licensing scheme, and that price differentials between license types were "relatively minor." However, plaintiff points to the depositions of several OEM executives who testified that even slight price differentials between the per processor and per system licenses meant that only the per processor license was financially viable.
This case was specifically about illegal use of monopoly power, which is why you can read:
> By 1988 Microsoft had obtained a monopoly position in the DOS market. For purposes of the present motions, Microsoft does not dispute the contention that it has such a monopoly in the operating systems market.
Without that assumption they could not have gotten summary judgement.
> This left other OSs out in the cold but the number of actual legit users installing something else was a rounding error.
Isn't that the whole point? They forced the OEMs to drop other OSs by abusing their monopoly position. If this is not dirty I don't know what is. But yes, MS has plenty of other dirty moves in their past. I don't trust them one bit, even with their new clothes on.
Because the reality is that the OEM doesn't want to track OS installations and Microsoft doesn't want to audit that tracking. With per-CPU licensing, the OEM can just say "here's our invoices from Intel".
The "per-CPU" policies were primarily at issue ~20-25 years ago. Most of the big OEMs didn't even offer significant customization unless you were buying for a whole office or organization.
I was reading a book on Microsoft's history and they did that back in the DOS days: any IBM PC clone that was sold had to pay for the MS-DOS license regardless of if the PC would be running MS-DOS or not. So unless someone explicitly asked for DR-DOS (and was fine to pay for both the MS-DOS and the DR-DOS license since the former would need to be paid anyway), manufacturers just used MS-DOS because it was "cheaper" (and with MS-DOS being the "standard" it isn't like they could afford to not license it).
