Linked by Thom Holwerda on Fri 31st Oct 2008 21:41 UTC, submitted by corey
If there is one operating system that has a special place in my heart, it's QNX. This microkernel operating system served as my main desktop operating system for months and months back in the day, during the short-lived QNX Desktop scene - which died out due to a lack of interest from QNX' parent company, QNX Software Systems. The money is in the embedded and high reliability markets, and that's where QSS - understandably - focused its efforts. QNX was sort-of open sourced in September 2007, and today the company has announced the release of QNX 6.4, the first major release since 6.3 in 2004.
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Member since:
2006-01-10
I agree. The weird thing is on my new P5Q motherboard, the BIOS seems to take an eternity, whereas the HP I have at work just flies through it.
My BIOS takes a good 15 seconds to boot. I've tried trimming it down, but it doesn't help much.
Linux itself usually boots in about 20-25 seconds. Windows Vista takes forever and a day...
But for all those crackheads that want their computers to boot into their OS fast, shouldn't we have trimmed down Bioses? Hell, Windows half the time doesn't pay attention to Bios settings anyhow.
I knew a guy who originally had an all SCSI system, and so he disabled the IDE devices inside his PC so that they wouldn't sit there and scan for them (the SCSI card took long enough by itself) and when he added a DVD burner to his setup, forgot to re-enable the IDE. So when he burned things it'd take 8 hours to burn! But Windows said nothing. It just saw the device as if it was enabled and went for it.
I laughed really hard at him because he hadn't thought about going into the BIOS to fix it. In essence it was one of those "When are you going to come over and fix it for me?" and months later, I finally got around to it and fixed it in less than 5 minutes.