dennis@home wrote:

"Steve Firth" wrote in message
. ..
Martin Bonner wrote:

And most amusing that you don't understand why this event is a bad
thing. Still what do people expect when they run a ****e old system
dependent on a BIOS?

What do you use that doesn't?

The Clue is in the header, but to spell it out, I use OSX, althugh
that's simply one of several operating systems that have no use for the
PC BIOS. The basic input/output system used is Intel's EFI, which
Microsoft should support, but for reasons of the usual Microsoft
****wittery, don't.

The reason they don't use efi is because they load their own BIOS as
part of the OS, just like freebsd and linux do.
Using efi may make it easier for the OS designer but it makes the os
dependent on the ROM contents on the machine.
Its somewhat easier to load the OSes own BIOS into RAM.
Strange as it may seem I think you will find OSX also loads its drivers
into RAM and bypasses EFI after booting too.

Of course it does, but the EFI bit makes sure that

- Apple stuff won't boot on generic PC hardware
- the APple marketing people can add another piEce Of BS tO theiR
marketing ****e to tell mac gopis how wonderful life is when sitting at
Guru Jobs' kneees.

This is because the OS then knows it has the latest and also because
stuff runs a lot faster from RAM than from ROM on nearly evey machine.
BTW if you are a hardware supplier and you do use efi do you compile it
to run as 16,32 or 64 bit and which OSes wouldn't work if you used 64 bit?
If you don't compile it for 64bit how does the OS work?


(That's a serious question - I am interested). I also would have
thought
that any architecture that uses an operating system which is stored on
disk must be vunerable to a virus rewriting the well known location from
which the initial ROM reads the operating system.

Only if the operating system is lame enough to permit software run in
user space to rewrite parts of the OS. Or if like Microsoft products
they are lame enough to require users to run all software as
administrators if they expect to get any work done.


Which M$ products require that?
Any OS in the last 6 years?
If you needed to run as admin then you didn't know how to use windows.
I have found that Mac people don't want to hear the truth - that a Mac
is in fact juts a over priced PC running a prettier and slightly more
stable windowing system that runs slower, has less hardware and software
support, but otherwise is just after all another bloody computer..