M$ to integrate Windows with BIOS... dammit

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2003-10-13 01:19pm

http://news.zdnet.co.uk/0,39020330,39116902,00.htm
Can you sayl D, R, and M?

This unholy marriage must be broken up...

Then again, there's always Macs and YellowDog Linux...
Some pro MS people have been claiming Apple have been doing it, but I haven't heard about any DRM in there, and you can still boot into Linux, so ????

Too bad Award got bought by Phoenix.

How healthy is AMI?

Even if fears of bios lockout of linux are unfounded, I would like my BIOS to be OS-neutral anyway.

http://interviews.slashdot.org/intervie ... ml?tid=137
Apparently TCPA is optional (for software/OS makers). Good.

Oh, and another annoying thing about Phoenix... They forced the mozilla project to change the Phoenix browser's name to Firebird. Um... how does a web browser infringe on the trademark of a BIOS manufacturer? Well, alright... they make a browser and various other things embedded in a linux based BIOS. So scratch that.

Vertigo1 · Post by **Vertigo1** » 2003-10-13 03:56pm

Bleh, fuck that. I'll stick on my current board and overclock the shit out of the processor before I buy a board with DRM bullshit on it. I don't give a damn if its against the law or not. If they don't like it, thats tough shit.

Seggybop · Post by **Seggybop** » 2003-10-13 06:51pm

Hopefully flashing a hacked BIOS will be able to deal with this trash.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2003-10-13 07:14pm

Except that flashing might be disabled. If not, you have the linuxbios project, but that can only boot Linux, and on a few mobos Windows.

The problem is that you might flash it into an unusable state.

aerius · Post by **aerius** » 2003-10-13 09:40pm

From the article:

Microsoft said integration should mean simpler and more reliable computers. "This is a pivotal change for the industry, and it will rapidly advance serviceability, deployment, and management for servers, mobile devices, and desktops," said Microsoft general manager of Windows hardware Tom Phillips, in a statement. "Effectively, Phoenix is creating an entirely new category of system software."

Microsoft said the next-generation BIOS would allow future versions of Windows to manage server blades when they are connected to a system, without needing to be turned on. The BIOS would also allow better control of unauthorised devices connected to a system, Microsoft said.

Since when has Microshit made something simple and reliable? Shit, the way things are going they'll need a 100Mb chip to hold all the BIOS settings, and the BIOS will crash like a motherfucker. Allow better control of unauthorized devices? Bwahahahaha! Gimme a break, betcha the damn thing will have more security holes than Internet Explorer. First they get rid of DOS with Windows9x and now they want to integrate BIOS into their OS? Can you say "goatfuck"? Here's to making sure my next computer is Phoenix free.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-10-13 10:00pm

What was wrong with getting rid of DOS? It was also present in Windows 95 (as DOS 7.0).

aerius · Post by **aerius** » 2003-10-13 10:10pm

phongn wrote:What was wrong with getting rid of DOS? It was also present in Windows 95 (as DOS 7.0).

Nothing really, except it made some of my DOS games unplayable which kinda pissed me off back then, but I got over it. Still, a Microsoft OS integrated BIOS is a solution looking for a problem at best, but somehow I get the feeling it'll be a complete clusterfuck.

EmperorMing · Post by **EmperorMing** » 2003-10-13 10:27pm

This will make me invest in some yesteryear equipment so that I will still have a running box.

I like my current hardware/software config, as 'they' can't reach into it if I don't want them to.

Post by **Darth Wong** » 2003-10-13 10:35pm

It's all part of the TCPA/Palladium master plan to give the big media companies strict control over how we use our own computers. Praise be to Big Brother!

Sharp-kun · Post by **Sharp-kun** » 2003-10-14 08:31am

aerius wrote:they get rid of DOS with Windows9x

It had to go eventually.

Coaan · Post by **Coaan** » 2003-10-14 08:57am

that's actually a fallacy...

windows 9.x didn't 'remove' dos...as that's absolutely impossible. All windows has done is make a nice and shiny overlay to hide dos from everyone.

why?

What else has complete control over windows?

Dos. anyone with half a brain can work and manipulate dos in such a manner that it can completely override windows and edit/delete it with impunity...it's quite frankly dangerous to M$...even in windows xp..there are surefire ways to get to dos that do not include it's shitty 'command prompt' built into windows, the same with nt.

Vertigo1 · Post by **Vertigo1** » 2003-10-15 02:49am

Pu-239 wrote:Except that flashing might be disabled. If not, you have the linuxbios project, but that can only boot Linux, and on a few mobos Windows.

The problem is that you might flash it into an unusable state.

What's to stop me from grounding the write-enable pin and flashing it that way? (or hotflashing it in another motherboard)

His Divine Shadow · Post by **His Divine Shadow** » 2003-10-15 03:23am

Darth Wong wrote:It's all part of the TCPA/Palladium master plan to give the big media companies strict control over how we use our own computers. Praise be to Big Brother!

Hey, that actually worked, the black choppers are turning back from your house now.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2003-10-15 07:56pm

Coaan wrote:that's actually a fallacy...

windows 9.x didn't 'remove' dos...as that's absolutely impossible. All windows has done is make a nice and shiny overlay to hide dos from everyone.

why?

What else has complete control over windows?

Dos. anyone with half a brain can work and manipulate dos in such a manner that it can completely override windows and edit/delete it with impunity...it's quite frankly dangerous to M$...even in windows xp..there are surefire ways to get to dos that do not include it's shitty 'command prompt' built into windows, the same with nt.

What a load of concentrated shit!

The win9x kernal was biult from the ground up for multipuly MS-DOS boxes(pre-emptive multitasking, took till OSX for macs to get it). Win9x was effectively a 2nd OS which used DOS as a boot loader.

Also MS-DOS wasnt much of an OS, at all.

WinNT derivitives are not based on MS-DOS like Win9x is. The "Command prompt" is a CLI (Command Line Interface), it is not MS-DOS (Disk Operating System). It has a emulation layer which supports some of the features of DOS (you need to download extension modules to this layer to get better support for misc stuff, ie sound), but WinNT is not based on MS-DOS.

Heck, MS-DOS cant even run on my computer since I use NTFS(MS-Dos only knows about the various flavours of the FAT FS). In my view, any idiot who uses FAT32 and runs an NT based OS deserves any problems they get.

Vendetta · Post by **Vendetta** » 2003-10-15 08:41pm

You can get readers for NTFS that work from a standard DOS boot disk.

But that's introducing something from outside the OS.

Windows NT on it's own does not include an external command line like MS-DOS, only an internal one. There is, in fact, no way to get to DOS with just NT5. (The NT command line, actually, is far from being 'shitty'. It has full command line control over all the system services and devices. Damn useful when you want to mend something without faffing around in five thousand seperate windows)

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-10-15 08:59pm

Coaan wrote:that's actually a fallacy...

windows 9.x didn't 'remove' dos...as that's absolutely impossible.

Actually, Microsoft wanted to remove DOS as far back as when Windows 4.0 (aka W95) was in development, but market pressure forced them to keep it in. Windows ME wholly removed DOS except for a few old things like the bootloader.

Windows NT 3.1 did not have DOS at all, by the way.

All windows has done is make a nice and shiny overlay to hide dos from everyone.

Bzt, try again. That hasn't been true since Windows 3.11, and even it was capable of things that DOS was not using Win32s. Windows 95 was much more than MS-DOS ever was. Preemptable multitasking, anyone? No more messing around with memory management?

Furthermore, I wasn't aware that the NT, CE or PocketPC/Mobile-based versions of Windows had DOS, either.

Dos. anyone with half a brain can work and manipulate dos in such a manner that it can completely override windows and edit/delete it with impunity

Yes, because you can't do that without DOS...oh wait.

...it's quite frankly dangerous to M$...even in windows xp..there are surefire ways to get to dos that do not include it's shitty 'command prompt' built into windows, the same with nt.

NT's command interpreter is far, far superior to the basic COMMAND.COM available to MS-DOS and the Windows 9X series. Furthermore, you can't get to DOS with any of the NT-based operating systems: it simply doesn't exist.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2003-10-15 09:39pm

ggs wrote: Heck, MS-DOS cant even run on my computer since I use NTFS(MS-Dos only knows about the various flavours of the FAT FS). In my view, any idiot who uses FAT32 and runs an NT based OS deserves any problems they get.

I'm insulted. Then again, for my purposes, I might as well be running Win9x, since all I use that for is gaming, since Linux is my main OS and I need write access to that drive (NTFS not worth the trouble of creating a shared partition and resizing all my FSes yet again.

It's a pity that NT based OSes don't have a command line only mode except recovery, since I fail to see the point of running a full blown GUI on servers

. Also would be helpful for repairing stuff when GUI is broken. Then again, even the NT command line is bad compared to *nix, unless you install unxutils or something (pieces of cygwin installed in [windows folder]/system(32), so you don't need to start up bash.

Crayz9000 · Post by **Crayz9000** » 2003-10-16 02:18am

Pu-239 wrote:It's a pity that NT based OSes don't have a command line only mode except recovery, since I fail to see the point of running a full blown GUI on servers . Also would be helpful for repairing stuff when GUI is broken. Then again, even the NT command line is bad compared to *nix, unless you install unxutils or something (pieces of cygwin installed in [windows folder]/system(32), so you don't need to start up bash.

Or you can add the cygwin/bin folder to your $PATH variable.

At any rate, the lack of a commandline-only mode has bugged the hell out of me, especially when I have a DLL version mismatch and need to remove the offending file... except that "the file is in use" and can't be removed.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-10-16 09:16am

Well, there is the recovery console. I wish Microsoft made it more full-featured, but those are the breaks.

And in Windows, it's %path%

Crayz9000 · Post by **Crayz9000** » 2003-10-16 10:29am

phongn wrote:And in Windows, it's %path%

Bah, I haven't used DOS or Windows heavily in ages. I could probably still rewrite config.sys and autoexec.bat to give a custom boot menu under 9x, but I'm not as proficient as I used to be.

(I keep trying to use ls in Windows, as well as using forward slashes for folders...)

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2003-10-16 10:34am

IIRC, parts of Windows is "slash" agnostic for paths. It's strange.

Xon · Post by **Xon** » 2003-10-16 10:45am

Pu-239 wrote:
ggs wrote: Heck, MS-DOS cant even run on my computer since I use NTFS(MS-Dos only knows about the various flavours of the FAT FS). In my view, any idiot who uses FAT32 and runs an NT based OS deserves any problems they get.
I'm insulted. Then again, for my purposes, I might as well be running Win9x, since all I use that for is gaming, since Linux is my main OS and I need write access to that drive (NTFS not worth the trouble of creating a shared partition and resizing all my FSes yet again.

I understand NTFS writers are still unstable as hell in lunix, so the use of a FAT swap file to move/copy stuff from Windows to linux is understandable.

I'm talking about idiots who have the core OS on a FAT partition, and then wonder why it f*cksup when the computer unexpectedly is reset on them for some reason.

Pu-239 · Post by **Pu-239** » 2003-10-16 03:47pm

Crayz9000 wrote: (I keep trying to use ls in Windows, as well as using forward slashes for folders...)

Hehe, same here.

His Divine Shadow · Post by **His Divine Shadow** » 2003-10-16 04:51pm

I dunno what Is is but forward slashes work in XP anyway.

Crazy_Vasey · Post by **Crazy_Vasey** » 2003-10-16 06:00pm

Yeah, forward slashes work for most things. I'd be knackered if they didn't as I have a US keyboard and with a UK mapping there's no backslash, which is a bit of a pain when you're programming. I don't have the vertical bar either, which makes programming in Haskell a little difficult.