Linus Torvalds has picked up one of Apple's new Intel-based Mac minis to play with, but the Linux creator still prefers Apple's old PowerPC architecture for his primary desktop machine. "I'm actually still running a G5, but I also have a Mac mini," Torvalds revealed today in an e-mail to ZDNet Australia. "I like the design, and it's the right form-factor to be a replacement machine for my wife and daughter, but sadly, Apple screwed up the firmware in various stupid ways."
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2005-07-10
Actually I think the prognosis is pretty good. Since EFI supports the BIOS with a legacy support module, motherboards can get the real job done with EFI (so device developers are happy) and then load up the BIOS to support OSes that don't support EFI. Eventually, the legacy support module will be dropped or made a paid-for item ("Oh? So you want to run Windows XP - well, you need to buy a module for that... you can always just run Windows Vista SP2 though...")
GNU/Linux already supports EFI along with (obviously) MacOS X. Microsoft has not decided whether to support EFI, but they mention that if enough PCs run EFI (or BIOS on top of EFI) they would switch over. It's not like there's no backwards compatibility from EFI issues to stop people from getting on with the job.
Efi might be a good thing, but History has taught us that the best doesn't always prevail. Was VHS necessarily better than Betamax?
True. History shows that humanity needs to be dragged kicking and screaming to consider the common good (environmental pollution, world hunger, AIDS epidemics, peak oil, etc) and computing is merely a microcosm of that. When you get notable role models in computing with less than well endowed abilities to analyse things objectively (I'm pointing my finger at not just Linus here) of course you can see why it takes a long time to get anything done.
As far as I can tell, the only time anything has definitely got done in computing recently is the introduction and protection of DRM systems to stop people from using what they've licensed in whatever way they see fit. Naturally, people pushing DRM usually don't give a damn about what your rights are anyhow.
As a side note. Beta was better than VHS quality wise. They lost because Sony made a series of mistakes (short playing time, refused to compromise on quality, refused to open the market up to innovation, didn't push connections with other manufacturers) drove VHS to the forefront (mostly as it could play an entire movie on a single tape) and Beta got relegated to editing studios and TV stations where the quality was better than VHS (think Digital Betacam SX). You'd have figured Sony would have learnt from the UMatic.
To this day JVC still market S-VHS, S-VHS ET and D-VHS, while Sony and other companies still quibble over stupidity such as BluRay vs HD-DVD when they could have combined forces to make a superior format with little risk. The reasons they won't is probably greed, pure and simple.
It's proven that co-operation is possible in the industry when everyone knows the rules and plays by them - in the case of JEDEC, nobody worries if SDRAM, DDR1 or DDR2 RAM is incompatible with motherboards if it's properly specified (speed, ECC or not, etc). Rambus tried to muscle in on the market and failed miserably, at least on the PC front (they were pretty good on the PS2, PS3 and N64). Greed doesn't pay. Period.
Member since:
2005-07-06
You might be right, but the real problem (IMHO) is that nobody except Apple is going to use EFI in the near future. Vista won't, Linux won't...
Efi might be a good thing, but History has taught us that the best doesn't always prevail. Was VHS necessarily better than Betamax?