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Phoenix Sounds Death Knell for BIOS
Anonymous Coward writes "The sky will fall next.... Betanews is carrying a story about Phoenix ditching the trusty old BIOS and moving to 'Trusted Computing'... ya right... Time to stock up on those old motherboards boys!" A follow-up/analysis on this story.
That's the problem, there won't really be any alternative, AMI has jumped on board too. Phoenix IS Award so there goes another competitior. The only ones left will be the big giant OEMs, like Compaq, and IBM who last I checked, still made their own BIOS.
~UltraSkuzzi
This comment is liscensed by SCO.
There is also OpenBIOS, an open source 'BIOS' based on OpenFirmware. OpenFirmware is the solution used on Sun, IBM and Apple based machines. OpenFirmware uses a forth interpreter and also presents the hardware as a device tree.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
CCS and EFI are both trying to be more like an OS rather than just a BIOS. If you really dig into either of them they are just quite a mess.
Time for LinuxBIOS www.LinuxBIOS.org
Quidquid latine dictum sit altum viditur
Corporate Headquarters
Phoenix Technologies Ltd.
915 Murphy Ranch Road
Milpitas, CA 95035
Toll Free 1.800.677.7305
Main 1.408.570.1000
Fax 1.408.570.1001
0110100100100000011000010110110100100000011000100
IBM and AMI? That's hardly competition, as IBM won't license their BIOS (which is the whole reason Phoenix was started) and AMI is rare now. LinuxBios? Not close to complete! BTW, is the old 1981 IBM BIOS code in public domain yet?
I've got this Compaq Tablet PC, and when it starts up, I see "Phoenix" in the lower right-hand corner. So, I guess that Compaq at uses Phoenix in at least it's Tablet PCs.
WTF, then, is this?
Here's a list:
IBM BIOS: IBM PCs and laptops
AMI BIOS: umm.. I don't think anyone uses them anymore
Pheonix BIOS: everyone else
Since Pheonix bought out Award, they are basically the only player in the BIOS market.
What I find interesting is that Taiwan's manufacturers have 80-odd percent of the motherboard market worldwide. And, since last I checked they haven't yet been annexed by the United States, I don't really see why they would give a rat's ass about "trusted computing" unless the marketplace demands it. If Phoenix, Award and AMI disappeared from the face of the Earth tomorrow, someone would come out with a compatible conventional BIOS in very short order. About the only thing I can see that would force them to produce DRM-based motherboards for the U.S. market would be some new laws making current designs illegal. That sounds farfetched, until you realize that Microsoft has a HUGE lobbying presence in Washington nowadays, and recently the Federal Government has been proving its willingness to meddle in technological affairs of which it understands nothing (witness the "broadcast flag" requirement for HDTV sets.) So my guess would be to start watching for a new "Consumer Data Protection Act" or something similar to show up in Congress, funded by Microsoft and its allies.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Then buy a mac. Macs don't use bios. They have Open Firmware and Apple is not associated with the TCPA.
Jesus was a compassionate social conservative who called individuals to sin no more.
megan@Outcastpr.com
:)
Interestingly they outsource their PR.
Above is the address of Megan Kurtz who is their public relations person. Get mailing now
Actually, I installed 10.3 last night without registering. Just select that you're 'not ready to connect to the Internet' and when prompted later to register, click 'register later'. Then, after rebooting, delete the alias to the registration program and don't use the wizard to configure the Internet settings. Really quite simple.
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21 -- Mathematics is the Language of Nature.
MSI uses AMI, even on their recent mainboards...
They won't. See SCOX. The problem is that Microsoft has *WAY TOO MUCH* money, and the U.S. has too many spineless politicians. The investors will see this as a market oppurtunity. The entire U.S. economy is so tied into Microsoft, that it has now become a *huge* pyramid scheme. If you are already a Microsoft stockholder, and you see the current stock market condition, you are pretty stuck these days. They must prop up their stock. Hence why you see so many IT managers these days pushing Microsoft internally even though they personally can see other (possibly easier/cheaper) solutions. Microsoft and their survival is a much bigger problem to the U.S. (and world) economy than a handful of 'terrorists'.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
you really DO need to read the project description of linuxbios.
>than the last significant threat (assault riffles) has been removed from citizens hands, the government has proceeded to clench down.
I'm pro-gun, but you are in error. Existing "assault rifles" are still in the hands of many citizens - legally. In addition, most of what what makes a rifle an "assault rifle" are the sights and magazine capacity. But what really gives a rifle its punch is the caliber, not the scary-looking accoutrements. You can still buy many excellent performing bolt action and semi-auto civilian rifles chambered in .223, .308, (equivalent to 5.56 and 7.62 NATO calibers) and beyond. You can even legally buy .50 caliber semi-auto rifles that could kill from a mile away or disable lightly armored vehicles. Armament issues aside, we have legions of potential "citizen soldiers" whose facility with longarms would help negate the advantages of full-auto "assault rifle" equipped so-called professional soldiers. Marksmanship, sadly, is declining among their ranks but it could be the Army's undoing if they are unleashed to quell a popular uprising.
>It teaches conformity in school
Then where the hell did the millions of non-conformists come from in the 60s for example? Surely those rebellious kids got their edumacation during the highly conformist late 40s and early 50s right?The problem is the constitution means nothing to the federal government. They walk all over the 1st, 2nd, 4th, 5th and 6th ammendments. They totally ignore the limitations in the 10th ammendment. I expect that the next ammendment to the constitution may be the final one; the one that makes all previous ammendments null and void. Think it can't happen? Read some history from Germany in 1920-1939 and then think again. Fascism happens when the pwer of the corporations exceeds the power of the governments. All we need is a supreme commander to finish it off. King George anyone?
Does anyone realize that with the recent Patriot Act 1 (overt) and Patriot Act 2 (covert) I could be investigated and arrested and held for a year without charge or trial as a "domestic terrorist" for putting the statement "The time has come for a revolution in this country" on my website? Yeah, hide your heads in the sand until they come for you. And someday they will.
As for me, give me liberty or give me death.
Davey B.
"Even paranoid people have real enemies" - T-Shirt
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
The website for Asus say that their latest boards have AMI BIOSs on them.
This is blatantly false.
Microsoft has NEVER said its next operating system would only run on Trusted Computing hardware, and I know for a fact that this is NOT the case.
Longhorn will run on normal PCs like we have today.
Lets take a look at the MICRSOFT WEBSITE:
Q: What is the Next-Generation Secure Computing Base?
A: The Next-Generation Secure Computing Base (NGSCB) is new security technology for the Microsoft(R) Windows(R) platform. It will be included as part of an upcoming version of the Microsoft Windows operating system, code-named "Longhorn." NGSCB employs a unique hardware and software design to enable new kinds of secure computing capabilities to provide enhanced data protection, privacy and system integrity.
Q: What is the "trusted computing base (TCB)" component of NGSCB?
A: The trusted computing base (TCB) includes the nexus and all the associated software and services required to enable the NGSCB environment.
Q: What is the "TPM"? Is that the same as the SSC?
A: The term "SSC" is generally interchangeable with "TPM" or trusted platform module. The TPM is a secure computing hardware module specified by the Trusted Computing Group
Please try to check your facts next time. The future Microsoft operating system will ONLY run if your computer contains a "Trusted Platfom Module", better known as TCPA.
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- - You can't take something off the Internet! That's like trying to take pee out of a swimming pool.
There were parameters you could set in the Parameter RAM (PRAM), like the default boot disk and the speaker volume. Those parameters aren't really the same thing as the settings found in a PC BIOS. The PRAM wasn't a BIOS; it was a very small amount of battery-backed memory in the clock chip.
For instance, any Mac is fully capable of checking itself over for bootable devices and then starting up off one of them -- whether that's the device the user has requested by holding down a key at boot, the user's preferred startup disk, or the first available startup disk. The boot device could be an ISA hard drive, SCSI hard drive, CD-ROM, DVD, floppy, Zip disk, FireWire hard drive, flash memory drive... All this functionality is a recent addition to the PC BIOS, and getting it to work often involves delving into an ancient, arcane text-mode interface.
NuBus beat PCI to the plug-and-play arena. When Macs still had NuBus, PCs used ISA cards that often needed BIOS tweaking to play nice. NuBus (a Texas Instruments invention, not Apple's) automatically configured the bus based on configuration ROMs on the cards.
My modern "New World architecture" Mac has NVRAM, which is different from the old PRAM. (PRAM is now emulated by Open Firmware and NVRAM.) As a user, I don't have to mess with NVRAM directly, ever. As a professional systems administrator, sometimes I go in and do things in OF, just as I would on a Sun system -- setting boot-diag? to true, for example, if something odd is happening (or I just want to see a Mac spew forth a text-mode bootup).
Aside from such geeking, the end-user never has to know that there's a special setting area that needs attention on a Mac. If you want to boot from a different drive, you use the GUI control panel to select it, or you hold down a key at boot to bring up a GUI list of your bootable disks. The user doesn't have to know that there's some special place they need to go -- it's all "the computer" instead of "the OS" and "the BIOS."
If "plug and play" works, why should an end user have to know that there's two levels of software involved in booting? Yeah, the geek may want to disable cards in software, but end users don't do that -- except when they have to work around broken PnP.
The one we have is the kind of Government they wanted. They had to establish one in which people wouldn't overthrow THEM.
Name 3 founding fathers who were not Aristocrats, I'm willing to bet you can't. You see, you can't establish a trade monopoly between the colonies and England if you only control (the kind they were concerned about at the time) one side of the water. So they did the next best thing, they explicitly forbid government granted monopolies in the Constitution.
And yes they felt the Taxes were Exorbitant, much like they are now. And much like now the AVERAGE citizen has no real recourse and no representation. Only the rich have representation in this nation from the founding fathers to the present day.