“Linux, Windows, Mac. All have their place, and before long that place will be in history books. The seeds of a new style of computing device have been sown, and as they grow they will inevitably lead to a world where the computer operating system as we know it today is as dead as the planetary transmission that drove the Model T Ford.” Read the editorial at NewsForge, by Roblimo.
Operating Systems Will Soon be Obsolete
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Damn, I love this style of gormless journalism… an embedded BIOS signals the deathknell of the OS
Somebody clearly hasn’t worked out what the OS in BIOS stand for.. and has gratuitously failed to consider the need for software which isnt supplied built in to be compatible.
I don’t see business users ditching SAP, SAGE and JD EDWARDS in a hurry in order to avoid buying OS licenses!
Ummmm… BIOS stands for Basic Input Output System. What does Output System have to do with your point?
Some vendors advertise their product as Built In Op Sys…
Well, then those vendors are wrong. BIOS has always stood for Basic Input Output System (sometime Services) since IBM released the PC (maybe before that).
If some vendors advertise BIOS as Built In Operating System…they’re either flat-out erroneous or they’re referring to a pre-loaded operating system like Windows already on the hard drive.
Well I like different ideas, various ideas but sometimes some of them are so dumb, I don’t know what to say. Just ask the simple question, there are millions (maybe billions) of lines of code written for the current operating systems. Unless the new operating system can support these applications, it doesn’t have any slight chance. Or it will have its place, but the old stuff will go on.
This reminded me something I read on cnet. They explain why Office is not available for Linux like this:
“Microsoft applications are not directly available on Linux because the operating system is a competitor to Windows. However, developers such as CodeWeavers have found ways of getting around this blockade in an effort to make desktop Linux installations more attractive to businesses”.
I mean how dumb is that, it is as dumb as the guy who writes it and the site who publishes it.
I wonder if the author visits OSNEWS. The idea of a system that was fairly ‘instant on’ was brought up here recently in the article discussing with Linux from scratch. While having nothing to do with lfs, the point was made about quick cold boot times. Progress here seems impressive, and it doesn’t look like the entire OS would have to sit in flash. The linux bios page claims to have booted a system in 3 seconds, which I find very impressive. While I don’t know the circumstances surrounding that 3 second boot, I believe it stands to reason that the technology is coming along and that this author is reletively uninformed – lest they would have noted and discussed the linuxbios project at least (or perhaps other projects, if they exist… I don’t know).
Given this, the article seemed extremely dry to me. It seems as if they base so much on one advancement in PheonixBIOS, as if they read the article and had a lightbulb go off and think ‘oh, the bios could replace the os one day! Think of how great it would be!’, and wrote the article, without investigating for projects in the works that might have the same or similar ideas in mind. If only the author would have compiled information reguarding said projects and their direction, and drawn some conclusions based on what we have and what they speculate is coming, I believe that this article would have been much more fruitful and certainly a warm welcome to the community. We need an article that really draws out what we have and where it’s going from this perspective, as I haven’t seen any and it’s an interesting subject to me.
“Somebody clearly hasn’t worked out what the OS in BIOS stand for.. ”
Well actually it stands for “Output System”, as in “Basic Input Output System”, not Operating System, as you seem to be implying.
But I agree that the article is a lot of talk about nothing new. Let me see, a computer where the whole operating system is held in ROM and starts as soon as you switch the machine on…. hmmm, most of them used to be like that (try Spectrum, Commodore 64, Amiga (I THINK, at least for the original), Atari ST, Archimedes).
but as floppys, and later hard disks, became common place, the loss of boot speed was outweighed by upgradability, and generally the OS moved off the board.
Maybe now that functionality and speed are getting to the point where they exceed the needs of the majority of consumers (meaning we don’t need to upgrade every other week) we’ll see a move back towards such systems for certain market sectors, but it’s hardly some great revolution in computing!
Now, if one moves OS services into the BIOS, does this remove the need for an OS, or does this merely move the OS?
The first computer I used was the TRS-80 Color Computer. It’s OS (what OS there was, anyway) was in ROM. The Amiga also kept many “essential” parts of its OS in the ROM, and to move from one major OS release to another (eg 1.3 to 2.0) required a new ROM.
Isn’t that essentially the same thing?
I started typing in my answer when there was only one post on here, I hit submit only to find half a dozen people have already made the same comment about the meaning of “BIOS”!
Wow, BIOS mfrs are finally starting to innovate. They’ve only been stale for over a decade now. I wonder if it has anything to do with LinuxBIOS threatening their monopoly.
http://www.linuxbios.org
Actually that editorial couldn’t be farther from the truth. Go to intel’s website or zdnet and look up efi. Basically it’s a more advanced form of BIOS but a BIOS nontheless that will actually reside on the hd on a hidden partition. As far as os’es being embedded, my old tandy 1000 TL used to have dos 3.1 embedded in it.
…but I do envision the day when the choice of operating systems becomes irrelevant. Perhaps that is the word Roblimo should have used instead of obsolete. As much as I love *nix for my day-to-day work and XP for gaming, there will come a day when our interaction with computers is so abstract that we won’t even be able to tell what operating system we’re using – nor will we care or be concerned about it. I’d say we’re pretty far away from this point though. As long as technology is profitable, it is in corporations’ best interests to ensure this does not come true so that they’re products are readily identifiable by consumers and not just commodities like apples – when was the last time you really cared which farm grew your apples so long as they’re of good quality and taste like the last ones you enjoyed?
This is a step back to the time of Acorns and Risc OS.
Then again, does it change much if you put the OS on a HD or on flash ROM? Just makes it a bit clunkier to upgrade, that’s all.
I cant see much practical use to this really. Other than maybe clustering or servers that could benefit from mounting everything as read-only. And for that we have LinuxBIOS. The only end-user use would be restoring the system should the real OS mess up.
But with all the marketing hype, this will probably become mainstream soon…
Yes. The article was a bit lame…
OSNews: Exploring the future of numbskulls’ editorials
…even with Linux or Windows on big ramdrives and such. I have often seen references to building such systems here:
http://www.cenatek.com/product_rocketdrive.cfm
http://www.kontron.com/
You can run Linux or Windows OS totally solid-state right now if you want to – the only limitation is the huge expense of doing so.
Even the latest RISCOS release comes on a set of ROMs, AFAIK. The problem is, that current apps are a bit too big for ROMs, but OTOH, prices are entirely dictated by PC manufacturers, so if they decide that 128 MB OS ROMs are the way to go, that technology will too be commoditised and dirt cheap.
almost everything that roblimo writes is lame. sometimes he writes a good article, most times not. he needs to do more research before posting things.
I cant see much practical use to this really.
I don’t know any home applicance (TVs, VCRs, DVD players etc) needing things like OS upgrades 😉
There’s a huge marketing for instant-on computers. Think cool goodies like e.g. home entertainament servers.
you get an idea, sit on it for a week. Then tell someone, more than one person if you’ve still got it in your head. When they tell you that’s retarded–that’s the way it was over 20 years ago, BIOSes are moving to HD instead of ROMs, even if OSes moved to ROMs–isn’t Linux, Windows, MacOS likely to make the transition, yadda, yadd, yadd, there’s a million reason to think this is idiotic, not revolutionary, not even interesting to discuss–then, and only then, may you save some energy and not write a bunch of twaddle…. and then, maybe then, Eugenia won’t be inspired to post such tripe so that a bunch of us can repeat ourselves over and over…
how would you build a computer where the software doesnt interact with the hardware? thats what the OS does, if im not mistaken…
A BIOS that resides o the hard drive? You know that doesn’t fill me with confidence….. especially with a mind to upgrades and long-term reliability.
I replace/upgrade hard drives regularly and wouldn’t fancy having an unbootable mobo afterward
i mean, he had absolutely nothing to say except some fantasy he has
It appears that Roblimo doesn’t seem to know what an OS is. An OS in ROM is still an OS. Perhaps someone should explain this all to Roblimo?
Okay, so maybe the author didn’t get it quite right. But there’s still some interesting ideas in there.
But desktop computers have basically reached a saturation point. The majority of *consumers* don’t want to mess with configuring the OS, and do like things such as “instant on”.
Of course, it won’t be the BIOS that does everything, but embedded OS’s. Desktops won’t disappear completely, but they will diminish as consumer devices become more powerful and ubiquitous.
Frankly, I’m quite fond of the generic, multi-purpose desktop, but consumer devices will become too convenient and inexpensive that it would be silly for most people to NOT use them. They will only turn to a desktop computer for specialized, high-powered stuff.
When we have computers that run 100,000 times faster than they do now ( http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=03/02/25/025215&mode=nes… )
How long will it take to boot up linux? Seems like it’d be pretty instant
Something tells me this guy is a bit gone in the head. Sure we could put an OS in hardware and not run a software OS on top – but that’s not going to make upgrading particularly easy is it?
More to the point – unlike “deadened” operating systems like windows where people know of nothing else – other OS’s are used as a matter of choice. I know that I for one am not going to want a computer that I can’t at least Dual boot in order to support Open Source coders world wide.
Before the NewWorld ROM on Disk architecture on the newer Mac’s (B&W G3’s and newer) the ROM chips in every Mac housed the core functionality of the OS, the MacToolbox.
On very old Macs and versions of their system software all the system calls, all the API calls, etc were all stored and accessed in the system’s ROM.
As updates and patches needed to be implemented, and an inability to continually update the ROM chips was evident, more and more functionality of the system began to be moved into the OS which was loaded into RAM. Now instead of just running everything from ROM the calls to ROM space could be trapped and then routed to updated functionaly that was in RAM, ie new API’s, patched MacToolbox calls. In fact it was this design that lead the Mac System Software designers to the “Extensions” mechanism which many people are so familiar with.
This design has tremendous limitations in terms of stability, scalability, and upgradability.
While a ROM based OS and API offers some benefits, and working within that type of system can lend itself to some pretty neat ways of doing things, it seems like a call back to the ways of yesteryear which have been abandoned in favor of more flexible systems of today.
That article has to be one of the dumbest things I’ve read in a while. A choice tidbit:
Think of what Microsoft did to Netscape by making MSIE part of the operating system (or claiming it had, anyway). Now think about incorporating operating system functions and higher-level apps — like Web browsers — directly into the BIOS. Suddenly the need for an “operating system” disappears. We remove a layer of code interpretation. We have a faster and more efficient device.
Computers would be faster if all programmers coded only in assembly, but that doesn’t make it a practical solution either.
The OS as i see it may never die. The OS is just not something that looks after your applications or makes more then on application run at one time. The OS is a platform. That is, the OS is a development envoronment, with tools, API’s and all these help the programer finish his product in a way that supposidly cant be done on other platforms. The job of the OS is to make a programers life easier. Microsoft do this via MFC, VB, Delphi etc… Apple do this through their equivelent… MS are also trying to do this with .NET. Sun do it with Java, and Amiga will be doing it with their current API’s and AmigaDE… The OS provides the APIs and tools that help developers succed! No bios is goign to change that. If an OS didnt exist, how would we write our applications? If ther were no APIs or tools?? Binary?
As long as Operating Systems keep advancing and keep making software development easier they will exist!!!
BIOS may become more functional, but i dont believe that justifies the end of OS’s. Infact i think it will empower the user and the developer to take advantage of the OS like never before.
The BLOG is going to take over everything.
The new BIOS = BLOG Input Output Services.
That’s right, your new machine will be able to “boot ‘n blog” right out of the box!
There is no need for old fashioned OS because there will be no need to do any real work in the SERVICE ECONOMY, right?
We’ll all sit back and BLOG and sip caffe latte.
It’s the future. Haven’t you read it yet?
>>dead as the planetary transmission that drove the Model T Ford.<<
Unfortenly for him the planetary transmission is far from dead, it’s getting it’s second wind with the coming of hybird cars. Cars like the toyota pruis use a large planetary for their transmission. Maybe this means OS’s arn’t dead
> I don’t know any home applicance (TVs, VCRs, DVD players etc) needing things like OS upgrades 😉
I do!
I have just bought a DVB (Digital Video Bordcasting?) box which has an “Update OS” button. I’ve even been pressing it about once a week, but no new releases have been released
Instant On computers, Hmmm Be
Back in the days 40’s 50’s and 60’s Computers did not have OS’s and it prooved to be very inefficient because a single program had control of the entire computer at one time, programers had to reinvent the wheel with every program.
While its hardly fair to compare computing today with computing back then. Its quite clear that OS’less computers were deemed obsolete a very long time ago.
But computers will still have Operating Systems. Embedded or not. It’ll still be there and some people will want to have options on that embedded OS (mostly scientists and other technology people who need specific things that are not available in the status-quo embedded OS). The OS concept is not dying off.
It angers me that only a tiny number of computing products have instant-on and “embedded” OS; Palm, Newton, and other similar PDA devices, but not desktops. One of the early Macs had the System in ROM. Tandy had DOS and DeskMate in ROM, too. Good idea for quick startup; bad for updates. Cost-effective non-volitile memory had been here for some time but desktops still load the OS on hard disks. Why? OS footprints are too big and they need constant updates.
I’ve updated my Palm about twice. Didn’t really need to. Did it for the Palm III features. It’s nice to know I can flash it to Palm OS 4, but I don’t have all kinds of bugs and system security issues to worry about. That’s how desktops should have been since 1995.
“Well, then those vendors are wrong. BIOS has always stood for Basic Input Output System (sometime Services) since IBM released the PC (maybe before that).”
Long before that. The BIOS was carried over from cp/m, which was in two parts: the BIOS (which was in a ROM) and the BDOS (Basic Disk Operating System) which operated the filing system and commands such as Dir. The BDOS was typically on a floppy, but could be in the ROM, in which case you had an instant-on computer.
The strange thing about current PCs is that there are two OSes – the BIOS is really a little OS in itself, which then boots up a much bigger one on a hard disk. But you have to have some kind of BIOS or equivalent to get the thing going when you are building a computer and the disk drive is blank.
When E doesn’t like what people say, invariably the, “Why don’t you go back to Slashdot, where you came from?” post either gets made in the moderated list, or sent to the person in private email.
Yet, Eugenia keeps a journal on Slashdot. Now she even posts links to articles written by the man who started Slashdot and maintains Slashcode.
So which is it? Is Slashdot something to be looked down upon from here (as certain actions from E point to) or is it something to be looked up to from here (as other actions from E suggest)?
Just a thought that when all else are completely converted to BIOS, the next leap will absolutely be DOS (Disk Operating System), as it will load the OS straight from disk (round platters spinning at X RPM).
History will repeat itself, I guess.
Anyway, BIOS or no BIOS, the OS will will definitely be there no matter what happens.
Castle’s Iyonix Risc OS PC has the OS in 4 MB ROM. It has a 600 MHz ARM cpu too. I’d love to get my hnads on one, but they’re pretty expensive (as is the shipping from England to the USA).
Maybe you could load the core components of the OS onto a non-volatile RAM disk. Or add NVRAM to the HDD and write the core OS right to /mbr. It would be difficult to change the basic concept of the “IBM clone” though, maybe Apple could try to implement something like that in the future. No matter how it’s loaded, there will always be an OS.
Please don’t promote Robin’s stuff here. Let him promote his dribble on Trashdot (sometimes known as Slashdot).
The heart of almost every automatic transmission for cars and trucks etc built to-date is the planetary gear set controlled by hydraulics.
There will always need to be a bootstrap loader. It can be made very small–for instance, on the TRS-80 Model 4 the bootstrap did nothing other than load the first few sectors of the mounted floppy and execute whatever code was there. (The Model 4 did have BASIC in ROM, but only used it when it was in the Model III mode.)
Having said that, the article’s pretty loopy. Roblimo doesn’t seem to understand what an “embedded OS” is, and doesn’t seem to be too aware of the distributed network model that most devices and operating systems are creeping toward, from “software updates” for MacOS and Windows to automatic network updates like the Hiptop. When bandwidth is sufficient I’d expect devices–including full-fledged PCs–which actually bootstrap to the network, with what amounts to local “OS caching” for speed and offline usablity. (With all due respect to Sun, the network is not the computer, but the network can be the storage device.)
Yeah thats correct, but thats just the gearset, what he was refering to is a differant use of a planatary where you used it as more of a torque split. I think the model T’s tranny used a varrient of the tranny Henry Ford used on the QuadraCycle (his first car, see henry ford museum (sp)). There he had two gear sets spinning all the time and wen you pushed the forward lever it tightened a belt and you went forwards. Push the other lever and it tightened the belt on the revease. But the two were connected so which ever one got the lock up is the way it went, like how with a planetary you can control how much torgue one output gets by controling the other output. it’s really a fun car to look at and see how it works. Gives you a real head scratcher on figureing out how a EE built a car at the turn of the century from scratch. Most of it you could figure out but some of it even a bunch of ME’s couldn’t. Then again we couldn’t get to take it apart
.
But it’s missing the ‘create a new oppressed-victim group’ to whine on about part.
A couple of years ago I saw a program that ran in the blank monitor space around the periphery of the main display window. This program did not run in MS windoze, but booted itself off the hard drive. It basically didn’t care what OS was running, because it bypassed it completely. It had some functionality in that it allowed you to connect to the internet, if I remember correctly. I don’t think much came of it, but it made a point, I think, that you can do a lot more with a lot less than most people think you can.
The idea of booting off the BIOS and ROM into some sort of web browser/application platform is not such a bad idea at all. In fact, MS killed Netscape because it feared Navigator was going directly there, and would make the MS OS redundant. If you make the ROM swapable via an external latch, like the hot swapable hard drives in big servers, you solve the “upgradability” problem. If, in fact, upgrading is necessary at all.
Also, applications themselves could reside on the internet and the local machine could simply provide an I/O system to interact with those apps. JAVA allows a lot of this to happen already. If you want to argue that JAVA then becomes the OS, go ahead. The point is, you can probably get by with a lot less complexity on the local machine. Think of the internet as a big application server and the local machine a dumb terminal with a hard drive for storage.
Anyway, that’s my 2 bits worth at the moment.
IBM is spending on Hypervisor (which runs at a lower level than the OS) — that combines with eLiza is the future.
I’m not very knowledgeable when it comes to near philosophical computer theory as such. Even so, my mind has always looked at computers in the respect like this: The computer is the car.. the OS is the driver of the car. Such things as device drivers are like the arms, feet and other ‘virutal’ appendages or pathways of the vehicle driver that communicate with the components of the car. (ie. foot controls speed, hands control direction to be simple)
My view point is that no matter how you start back from the beginning you either have one program that controls the computer or an OS which the program(s) communicate through to get the PC to do whatever instruction is intended. The last i checked OS did mean “operating” system. How else will PC’s run? Even if you hooked a computer to my brain through some apparatus in which i would be able to control the computer, I would still be the operating system. If i missed the point, nevermind me.. simple simple mind haha.
I don’t see any insane need to speed up boot times. How many times a day do you actually reboot your machine? two? three? If you’re hitting five dozen reboots per day then maybe you need it, but you’d be doing something very weird with your computer.
Optimise where you need to. The 2 or 3 seconds saving at boot time is just not worth the extra hassle of having the OS stored in a chip (Or do you really think hot-flashing an EPROM is better than hot-updating an OS on a hardrive?).
A better plan would be a tiny (50 mb or so) hard drive with fast access times and dedicated SCSI interface integrated into the motherboard to store the OS kernel/boot code on. That way you get the best of both worlds, an upgradeable/replaceable OS and fast boot times thanks to reduced hd access time.
Having met the author in person and talked to him for a couple hours altogether, I’m utterly deceived by him bringing something like that. Like many others pointed out, an OS in ROM is still an OS.
And for your information Robin, having OSes in ROM goes back quite a couple years back, I remember finding PCs at friend’s houses running DOS 5.0 in ROM, you could take out the hard drives, floppy drives just plug the power to the mobo and have a command prompt. This is _old_ story, and ppl actually complained that they could not _EASILY_ upgrade their system or modify it to suit their needs.
PPL went back to standard OSes for a reason, and they are here to stay.
Eugenia: please, quality articles. That kind of stuff is good for /. only.
…In Many ways, it already has… But people have been focusing on the vitality and purpose of the OS… I would pose it as: what is the advantage of disconnecting “ROM/BIOS” from “OS”? Do you want to be able to control the ROM and OS independently? If you don’t have an “OS” loaded on your “computer” what do you have left? No ROM?
Firmware, flashability, efi… Don’t we want “OS”s in both “firmware” and “software on recordable media” whatever the hell the difference is? Aren’t there a million things you can do with BOTH?
Anyway, that’s me trying to be philosophical…
Idiotic ideas/argument expressed in the artical, but it stimiluted an interesting conversation, gotta give it that.
To: Jon Hodgson
Jack Perry
You are correct about the original Amiga, as well ast the C64, C128, and the others. They all used ROM chips for the OS and, yes, they were instant on.
This is basically your idea Jack; Now, if someone would just do the same thing with large-scale ROM-type chips that were plug-n-play. Then we could have our OS ready instantly and still be able to upgrade from time to time. Replace the ROM chip.
Just an idea.
While we’re on the topic of more or less intelligent firmwares, don’t you think it’s about time that the Wintel PC were dragged screaming and kicking into the nineties? Why can’t they use OpenFirmware like everyone else?
The only way I can see computers become OS-less in an abstract sense of the phrase is if one OS becomes so ubiquitous that others are simply relegated to irrelevance. Oh wait, that was the situation with Windows a couple years ago, hence all the amazing applications and games for Windows.
Now that Linux (or GNU/Linux depending on how righteous you’re feeling today) is poised to steamroll every other OS out there, then programmers who are concerned about “upward compatibility” would be wise to choose Linux as the platform for their next killer app.
Personally, as a programmer, I feel Windows is a dying platform, so by looking into the future and seeing that my programming efforts may be threatened by a mass exodus away from the MS platform, now is probably a good time to jump on the Linux bandwagon.
Furthermore, I am happy using Java for apps that don’t require super speed, but it seems even Java GUI apps are starting to keep up with apps created with native GUI toolkits like Qt, GTK+, etc …
The reason why Java is becoming such a popular app language is that one of a programmer’s worst fears is getting stuck on a loser platform. Java somewhat mitigates this risk of future losses in productivity.
As the open source process commodotizes low level facilities like OS and GUI APIs even Java is in the cross hairs. Like someone said, the OS is there to make the life of the programmer easier. Just as the GUI toolkits are there to make the life of app programmers easier. The only OSs I see dying are those that are closed and proprietary. That is not for ideological reasons, rather, it is for Darwinian reasons. Whether or not this has been proved, but the assumption goes that when the code is open, weaknesses get exposed and killed much faster than in a small proprietary environment. So the theory goes … Whether or not this is true, I still believe bugs in the free software world get fixed faster and at a higher volume than in the closed-source world.
There will always be choice in the OS world, but I think Linux or some other open source OS is going to become so dominant that the question, “what platform should I write for?” is going to become somewhat less relevant than it is now. I don’t see the comoditization and standardization of the OS as a bad thing. Perhaps this is what it means to have an OS-less computer. Maybe the OS is there, only it is so damn good that nobody even knows its there. That’ll be the day.
I didn’t read all 55 previous posts, but so many people commented about the Vic, and tandy’s etc having the OS on bbot ROM, I starting thinking about my routers. The come with an empty file structure on the FLASH RAM and you load the IOS in to the structure. Its practically instant on.. so nothing new here it sounds like.
P.S. Windows is not a dying platform. As Dell when the last time they sold a linux workstation is.
BTW: I have a question to ask a lot of you .. honestly. Is it me, or am I the only guy that can seem to keep his NT4 and Win2k servers up for 3 to 9 months at a time? Admitedly, if I move the mouse anywhere the Properties page on Network Neighborhood, I’ll have to reboot ( just making a wise crack about having to restart when you change even the IP address). As well, I have about 200 users with NT 4 and Win2k mixed and basically everyone shuts down on friday for the weekend. Other than that, I know only a few people have to reboot during the week for some goofball windows problem. I ask because when I tell people my PC/server mix, they say -wow you must been one busy guy. I tell them that I don’t let the users do anything other than business software on their PC’s! comments
Hopefully this isn’t redundant, “Built-in operating system” is what Neal Stephenson calls BIOS in his novel Snow Crash. He acknowledges that he got this wrong. (Although makes a point that he thinks it *should* stand for Built-in operating system)
Rather boils down to that question.
An OS provides (basically) 2 things:
1) A hardware abstraction and management layer.
2) A set of standard libraries to simplify application development.
When it comes down to it, only #1 is *really* the OS, but #2 is pretty much considered part of the OS, though the lines between #2 and the application itself are somewhat blurred. (And even #1 will likely have some overlap with #2).
Any and all of that can be (and frequently has been) held in some sort of ROM or NVRAM. And there are advantages to doing so (speed being the main one), and some disadvantages (harder to upgrade, though flashing isn’t exactly rocket science…) And, if the OS is well designed, safely and reversibly patching to RAM is perfectly possible too.
First off.. with linux i reboot maybe once a week 2ndly.. think about how great it would be to actually have a virus in your bios? Yum Yum Gitcha some!3rdly a BIOS is an operating system 4th do you know what you are talking about?? Stick with toasters or home appliances
The article was lame and the content was nonsense. The Operating system will never be replaced , ever, The BIOS is obsolete and this article strikes me as written by someone who wants to bring his old 386 back into action. The BIOS means Basic Input Output System. Its only used to do some basic things, sure people have expanded on it, ie. Internet access, DVD Playback but I seriously doubt we will see the BIOS replace the Operating System, get a life.
I don’t see any insane need to speed up boot times. How many times a day do you actually reboot your machine? two? three?
Let me guess, you’re a WindoZe user right? Try using a real OS like Linux.
“”Let me guess, you’re a WindoZe user right? Try using a real OS like Linux.””
I use an LFS derived Linux/Win2k/WinXP, the only time I have to reboot is when _I_ have shutdown the computer or switch OS. Seeing as I don’t enjoy having the thing sitting there running up the electricity bill for hours while I’m not doing anything I turn it off two or three times a day.
Go back to your command line and slaver over your uptime, stupid Linux troll person.
one can always ensure what us your running by typing uname -a
and if it happens to be a windoze os then all you got to do is boot up your pocket caried knoppix cd and destroy the widoze partition and install knoppix :>
yea bioses will give way to operating systems and we will all be thown back to the 1980’s where you get to write your own programs for your computer and your very own device drivers fun