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A Motherboard That Doesn't Require An OS
An anonymous reader submits a link to this review of "motherboard that allows access to your multimedia devices via a special BIOS. No operating system required! Good for a home entertainment PC I guess." The review says that it will come bundled with a TV tuner card, too.
At what point does a bios become an operating system in and of itself. Seems like all the features this thing has will require more than just basic input/output.
"Come on, let's go drink till we can't feel feelings anymore."
Just when I overclock mine, they cancel Martha Stewart.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I'm guessing this means it's going to still crash, right?
Yeah, it is so hard to come by an OS these days. I mean, they are SO expensive!
Isn't an operating system a program that allows you to control your devices? This still does that, its just all contained in the ROM. Pretty neat, but still an OS. Surely not as bloated as MS media center. (note: I haven't actually tried media center, I'm just guessing)
"Wisdom is not a product of schooling but of the life-long attempt to acquire it." -Albert Einstein
This will cause the death of linux. I mean what's better than a free OS? NO OS!
This Tom's HW Article talks about the MSI MiniPC that does the same thing.
Makes me wish I'd held off on buying my Shuttle.
So it's a bit of a misnomer, isn't it, to say that you need no OS to access your multimedia components?
Show me an OS that doesn't require a motherboard, then I'll be impressed.
Another layer of complexity! And for what? So the operating system you do install overrides it and uses its own routines to access the hardware.
BIOS = BASIC input output system.
Its just not meant to do more. Blurring the edges like this is just plain silly - a duplication of effort at best. Another thing to go wrong and more complexity where its not needed. Now we have bloatware in the HARDWARE too!!!!
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
...slashdotted already...
But isn't this just a motherboard with its OS embedded in the 'bios'? Sort of one of those things I'd been expecting to see, but always figured it would be ushered in as a DRM requirement. ;-)
Quack, quack.
Bios used to mean, basic input output services. Now I guess it means basically inoperable operating system...
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
BIOS.
But I do get your point.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
They have already been slashdotted once before (August 2, 2002)...
...its in my xBox
Link: google define
Features in the bios seems a perfect application for the Linux Bios project, which puts the linux kernel on the bios flash. Could a minimalist Linux distribution be made to do similar features (TV cards, ethernet) while still fitting in the bios memory?
Phoenix is attempting to make a transition from a bios to a trusted startup environment. This means that it may be hard to install operating systems that are not signed by Phoenix... for money. Thus, windows, Redhat EL, and other commercial operating systems will continue to work fine. This may make custom Linux installs next to impossible - without modchips. (can anyone say xbox?)
Does anyone know if they're going to be porting Duke Nukem: Forever to run on BIOS.
Macintoshes have been able to play Pong in BIOS for years. This is nothing particularly novel.
Their webserver didn't require a Slashdotting.
No operating system required! Good for a home entertainment PC I guess." The review says that it will come bundled with a TV tuner card, too
Hmm, let's see: a computer with a small piece of dedicated software in ROM, a TV tuner card and a monitor? Last I checked, I could get that sort of device, minus the messy VGA and keyboard cables, and with about zero boot time, at K-Mart for about $100, and with a bigger screen too.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Bah. It's Obviously Slashdotted.
So now you have to flash your bios every time a new codec-version is released?
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
Do I have to buy a new machine to get the upgrade?
So... It enable you to use your devices without booting your os ? So basicly you can get things running up as quickly as a tv set if your computer was powered off, and that's all ?
BTW, is this feature useless if you computer is already powered up ?
But it's pretty cool to see it is possible!
Please correct me if i said anything stupid !
This link shows Linux on a chip.
MSI have allready that on they MegaPC you can find a review on Tomshardware web site !
I don't believe that Slashdot get this storie on the main page. and they never put this storie about global warmimg online !
Soyo SY-P4VAL Version M Multimedia Ready Motherboard
Model: SY-P4VAL
Manufacturer: Soyo
Provider: Soyo
Reviewed By: Miguel
Review Date:
Page 1
Board Layout & Features
This is not meant to be an enthusiast board so there's no cool colored PCB. In fact, at first glance, it looks just like any other motherboard. It's what it offers that sets it apart from all the rest. The board is almost identical to Soyo's SY-P4VGA with the exception that it carries the Whizpro BIOS utility instead of the AWARD BIOS and also includes the etBIOS "Instant On" feature. It is based on VIA's P4M266A/8235 chipset.
One nice feature is the support for both DDR and SDRAM memory modules. Being that the average user would likely use memory they have lying around to build an HTPC, it is certainly an excellent feature. Two slots support up to 2GB of DDR 200/266 and one slot supports up to 1GB of PC100/133 memory. That's plenty of memory power for its intended purpose. There's a warning label on the memory slots indicating that the power should be unplugged prior to installing your memory modules. On the other corner of the board, you'll find your IDE and floppy connectors. Up to four drives can be installed if desired.
The Soyo SY-P4VAL supports 533/400 FSB Pentium 4 processors. What? No 800FSB support? Yes, that's right, but considering that the board is not targeted at the mainstream enthusiast where performance is the absolute highest priority, it is quite clear why they chose this route. For its intended use, that's plenty of power. To satisfy those who do crave the extra power, the SY-P4VAL supports Pentium 4 processors up to 3.06GHz. There is plenty of space around the socket to install a larger heatsink if desired, however, being that the board would probably end up in a living room or den, the added noise is really not necessary.
The SY-P4VAL is an ATX motherboard and therefore, offers the standard 5 PCI slots. This motherboard comes with video onboard but they provide an AGP slot for those who wish to upgrade. The AGP slot has a flip type retention mechanism and has 2X and 4X support. The Northbridge is passively cooled with a standard size aluminum heatsink.
This board has just about every feature you can ask for with the exception of Firewire support. The I/O panel includes a VGA port, RJ45 LAN jack, four USB ports and your audio jacks including line in/out and mic jacks.
The only negative comment I'll make on the board's layout is the placement of the ATX connector. It is located behind the I/O panel and creates unnecessary cable clutter.
The BIOS
We will be looking at the BIOS in detail as the Soyo SY-P4VAL carries a rather unique yet user-friendly Whizpro BIOS that most will not be familiar with. Although a bit different than what I'm used to, I really like this well-structured BIOS utility.
One reason is the System Information Menu. It takes about 3 seconds to load but it gives you detailed information on your hardware as well as the BIOS ID and Revision information. There are two pages worth of information on your devices.
The General Configuration Menu allows you to define your boot order as well as enable/disable password protection. The Advanced Configuration Menu mainly allows you to define your POST details. There is even a "Quiet Boot" option that when enabled, will only show error messages (if any) during boot.
The etBIOS Configuration Menu is where you will define how the Version M BIOS (Instant on feature) will function. Being that this is the most impressive feature, we will look at it in great detail a bit later. Because of its intended use, there are no overclocking options but the System Specific Menu will allow you to tweak your memory a bit.
The Peripherals Menu mainly allows you to enable/disable any of the onboard devices such as your audio, lan and USB. What is missing is the option to disable the onboard video. This is odd, but we did no
So it supports various hardware in the BIOS rather than the OS. But unless it's got the rest of an OS on it, you're either putting some OS on top of it (which can be simpler than other OSes, but the fact is that those OSes have already been written and removing support would be more work) or you can write code on the bare metal.
I'd hate to give up all the things that an OS supports for me, but I suppose that many of them (memory management, processes, libraries, windowing, keyboard, filesystem) aren't necessary on an embedded system. As long as there's a cross-compiler for it and a way to get that stuff on, you may well be able to work with just the BIOS.
Oh, and I tried to RTFA, which would presumably answer my question, but it's slashdotted, so I'm really aiming my question at the embedded software developers out there.
http://www20.tomshardware.com/howto/20040227/index .html
It doesn't say that it includes the TV capability. However, audio functions work without any additional hardware at all out of the box. No HD, Processor, or memory required...
Interesting idea if you really want to save power. I'd rather fork over a few more cents per hour and have the capability to actually do something with the media though at a moments notice.
What would be interesting is being able to hook the bios into an existing OS to use the BIOS routines for playback, but your own UI.
Or hook into the BIOS and expand the number of TV cards it can use - or allow time shifting and the ability to generate a tv schedule, or transcoding.
...Every screen is a blue screen.
Why on earth would this feature be useful to ANYONE.
TV-Tuner functionality is questionable at best in a full-fledged OS. But in a BIOS?? Surly you must be joking!
I love that I can play my CDs and MP3s on my pc... while I work on other things. This monopolizes the whole system and turns it into an expensive DVD player. (Name one thing this can do that a cheap DVD player and a TV can't)
Not to mention that it's an embarrasing waste of resources. A 366mhz G3 could do this and more.
Oh, and hypothetically, I think it would be possible to hack something like this into a machine using openFirmware.
As an aside, it wouldn't be too difficult to write a small OS, deriving bits from Linux or BSD which could do the same thing and only take a few (under 5) seconds to boot (which would be quite plausable as you'd only need to load VERY few drivers). I could boot BeOS on my 750mhz athlon to the desktop in under 10 seconds.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
cheers, just what i was after.
... this project!
Seriously folks, I don't mean to get embroiled in the issue of semantics, but there are all sorts of devices in which their OS is lightweight enough to reside in ROM. If the boot code never hands control of the system off to a secondary module (loaded from a disk, for example) how is it not the OS?
What happens when this OS-less BIOS is corrupted or in need of an update/repair? My worst nightmare in PC is flashing BIOS, it gives you the feeling that if you did something wrong, you're dead. It's worse than reinstalling Windows 10 times, 4 hours each.
I hope it can be designed to be user-friendly enough, or are we going back to DOS style (not that DOS isn't UF-ly).
about 12 years ago when I told people that I wanted to learn Assembler (or Assembly as most people insist), most folks I spoke with declared I was foolish. (which was largely true)
;-)
Now bringing home about twice the bacon those same folks did, writing BIOS code, I just smile.
And as you see, we got the world by the bawls, us BIOS guys!
(seriously though, I think the BIOS is a piece of legacy crap that we need to get rid off... too bad it pays my bills)
...until an OS is loaded. PC users may feel constrained by the total lack of choices in software, but Mac users should feel right at home.
It was called "air construction architecture". Back in 8-bit era, I have seen a home made TRS-80 (Video Genie) clone machine, completely built out of components arranged in 3d with glue and wooden sticks and connected by plain LCUA wire, without any board. Of course, it was running NEWDOS-80, TRSDOS, LDOS and CP/M operating systems from 8'' floppy without any problems. This windy design has no problems with heat dissipation from Eastern-Germany made Z-80 CPU clone and Soviet Union made 16kx1 RAM chips anymore, unlike a board version had.
It is even possible on today's platforms, just take some PXA arm processor, wire some flash and ram chips to it, connect some ancient terminal to serial and alas, you have a linux machine.
There you are, staring at me again.
PS2, xbox, GC can all run software straight out of medias. This isn't that far fetched.
Lets see, it brings up the system from power off, and manages its resources...
That sounds like an OS..
So its in rom.. so what? Most embedded devices are that way...
---- Booth was a patriot ----
... ant tell him it really was Built In Operating System after all.
It might be a timesaver to hook into the BIOS for multimedia IO rather than rewriting your own from scratch. Smaller code. Faster?
On the other hand... if my bits never leave my low-level hardware...
*dons tinfoil hat*
Whats the difference between this product and a "true" embedded system?
If you can't see the value in jet powered ants you should turn in your nerd card. - Dunbal (464142)
My 3 year old toshiba laptop allows you to play audio off the memory card and cdrom with external play/next/last/stop buttons. It only requires a bootup of the os if you want to play dvds. I guess they went a step futher and allowed you to play a dvd, I cannot get to the site now to see :).
I was using an OS'less motherboard in 1983. My Commodore 64 kicked butt!
This sounds a lot like my Atari 400, just with snazzier upgraded tech. No "operating system" to load, you just turned it on, and you could do stuff with it, like loading a game or a word processor off tape or a disk. (It confused the heck out of me when I heard about having to put a disk in one of those CP/M boxes just to start it up.)
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
No smaktard. It's not the same thing.
If you weren't so busy trying to show us all how smart you are because this isn't news to you then you might have read the article and realized that what you tried to show off is just that... the Soyo system with the show off.
I don't like software drivers, it implies that you need special software in order for it to work. I wondered why hardware manufacturers just don't burn drivers onto a PROM on the card. Then get the OS looks for the drivers on the card itself. No more needing a floppy disk, or CD for software. You can upgrade the chip via flash for the newest drivers.
OK, why would you do this? Image all you really have to do at this point would be to just plug in the board and the OS would just find it. OK, how is this different from the way it is now you ask. Well, the OS does not have 50,000+ drivers that come with it. It does not need them, they are on the board.
No disks, no additional software, just plug and play for your sound/video card.
The intended audience for this is obviously the living-room entertainment machine sort of application. For instance, rather than have to wait while the OS loads, and then use some software-based UI just to play a CD, you just have to push the on-button, drop in your mp3 or audio CD and it'll automatically start playing within seconds - no having to turn on the TV to check things are ready/you've pushed a button on your remote keyboard at the wrong time etc.
If you want to play standard applications - just boot into your normal OS and fire up your divx player, stepmania etc. If you have replaced your home entertainment CD/mp3/DVD player with this and just want to access one of those functions in a UI that you haven't kludged together, with no OS wait/booting screens etc - no problem.
My only major request would be that it plays xvid/divx encoded avis in the BIOS environment as well - licence issues aside, I can easily foresee this being a great addition to one of those hushpc computers.
Soyo soyo! Chieko-san no yuudori!
Could you imagine what would happen if Microsoft got a hold of this.
Welcome to Windows 2008 BIOS PRO.... You have 78 critical BIOS updates to perform.
To uninstall Internet Explorer: Replace chips 45- 1035 and solder points 20, 40, 30, and 90. (At least you would be able to uninstall it I guess).
When installing Real player: It permanently writes spyware to part of your flash memory and then charges you for it.
Hey look no pointless curley braces or semicolons... just like Python
FORTH roolz, eh?
like Darl?
Sorry... too much SCO for one day... my bad.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
But does it run Linux?
I mean...
Does it support Ogg Vorbis?
Er, wait...
Shit. I'm out of material.
OpenFirmware is all nice and dandy (I use it on Sun and Macs) and I'd love to use it on anything which resembles a PC (not so much on desktop machines, but very much on server like machines), however I have yet to see a OpenFirmware implementation I could use.
I know there are implementations for embedded computers and hardware which requires some sort of BIOS (non-PC compatible stuff), but no need for that. So far FreeBSD has something useable with their bootloader, but it of course depends on the BIOS of the machine to boot the bootloader, which is not what I would like to have.
Is there an OpenFirmware implementation available for PC compatible hardware? If there is (I don't care if it's free or not as long as it's not more expensive than a new mainboard.)
Bottom line: "BIOS" is just a name. It used to stand for "Basic I/O Services", but now it means "whatever's convenient to have in onboard ROM so you don't have to read it off a disk." Words change.
The next thing you know, they will be making TVs and stereos that don't even require motherboards!
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Here's google's cache of the same page. I know the site isn't completely slashdotted- as it runs fine at some moments, and VERY slow at others. As usual, google's cache is much more reliable.
Oh the good old days
that's pretty damn cool.
The problem with being a geek, is that you never run out of cool crap that you "have to" buy... they keep bringing cooler and cooler shit to market.
just when I thought I wanted a mini-itx mobo for my PVR project this comes along... oy vey!
e.
Build Your Own PVR/HTPC news, reviews, &
that BIOS code is critical and readily flashable...
Ever had a virus that hosed your bios? You've now got a dead motherboard unless you've got a burner and some extra ROMS laying around (doesn't everyone?). Some companies have instituted an auto-switching dual bios that helps mitigate this risk, while others are jumper switchable
Still... it bothers me to have an irreversible "kill" feature on my computer... particularly since I'm error-prone like most people. Ever had a BIOS flash interrupted? I have... not pretty.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
This pretty much looks like one of the several PC based set-top boxes (I have worked with a bunch of them). It just comes with working FLASH'ed firmware instead of just the bootloader.
(S(SKK)(SKK))(S(SKK)(SKK))
No more long bootup times?
Found guilty of introducing damaging technology, the inventor was locked up in the same room as the guy that invented the car fueled by water. Next to the cell with the scientist that invented the seedless watermelon...
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
It's not ressources, but resources.
This should have been done a long time ago.
This will help device vendors create one universal driver for their devices instead of having platform dependant drivers, also this will help Linux be in the forefront of computing.
how nice it would be to never have to troubleshoot or install drivers on Windows or Linux or other nixes.
Very nice, but does it play Ogg Vorbis?
This is not the sig you're looking for.
... a beowulf cluster of these things!
*prays for forgiveness*
This seems like a good option to have on a motherboard for people who'd like to build an HTPC. The main problem I see with this is it does not offer a lot more features than a standalone DVD player in terms of expandability (most of them today offer VCD/SVCD/MP3...). Correct me if i'm wrong, but if a user wants to play Divx, Xvid, or any other codecs on this motherboard, then the user has to install an OS, which pretty much defeats the purpose of having a BIOS like that. It's a good start, but if they offered the option to load new codecs on the fly from a HD or CD-ROM drive maybe i'd think about getting one.
A motherboard is a unit designed to integrate a CPU with all the things it requires to do its job. It's not fundamentally designed with the idea of fulfilling a function in itself; that's a ridiculous proposition. It's a -mother- board for a reason. Making a BIOS that will handle your media is assinine; it discards all of the benefits of using a real computer (flexibility, easy troubleshooting/repair, modular operation, expandable functionality) and replaces them with a black box, which is totally NOT THE POINT of the PC! If you want a black box, go buy a DVD player. If you want a cool hack, write it yourself. This piece of hardware is never going anywhere.
If you want a CD player with no OS, buy a stand-alone one. If I've built a PC to do multimedia stuff, I've done it because I want to, for example, stream TV shows over a wireless network and remote control it via a web interface. Case in point: My (work) laptop can play audio CDs without having to be booted up using a little LCD screen and a bunch of buttons. I used this once before deciding it was pointless.
Oh, my weapon just bluescreened. Just give me a few minutes to reboot it here...... Oh, I need to edit the registry....... Just close these gun-for-hire pop-up ads..... Damn! the targeting is being slowed down to unusable by the virus scanner.... These bullets are for the new version and won't fit this chamber without an expensive upgrade?..... where did he go?
nothing.can.stop.me.now
Also look at the page on performance and you will see them compare it to the MSI KM2M Combo-L. If you do a google search on those terms, the first link is their review of that board, which can take a "1GHz to 2600+ processor." On the performance page they benchmark the Soyo P4VAL (Projected price, $69 without tuner) with "Pentium 4 2.4GHz 533MHz" ($124) against the MSI KM2M ($54) with an unspecified CPU, but it does not have 333FSB support so it can't be more than an Athlon XP 2600+ 266MHz FSB ($77 - Actually the 333FSB model is $2 cheaper.) Hence, $193 for the soyo vs $131 for the MSI plus its most powerful CPU. The MSI does almost as well on the CPU benchmark (4391 vs 5810 PCMarks) and does much worse than the Soyo on memory (2400 vs 4844) and their conclusion for this page is "The Soyo P4VAL will have an MSRP of around $69 (without TV tuner, remote, etc, just the board), which is only about $13 more than the KM2M motherboard. It will obviously offer you much more in terms of features and performance and therefore, it's simply a better buy." So let me get this straight, a full size motherboard which, with the tested CPU will run you $63 more, being used for a purpose which does not require massive memory bandwidth, is a better buy? Yes it offers the goofy BIOS menu but that thing doesn't even seem to have SVCD support.
That's right, they don't bother to tell us if it supports nonstandard-bitrate VCD (known as XVCD) and if it doesn't support XVCD, SVCD, and XSVCD, I consider that to be an amazingly crippled featureset for a multimedia PC, one which will mandate the use of a real live hard-drive-installed (or net-booted, I guess) operating system. Neither their etbios page nor soyo's page for the board bother to tell you what types of media are played, but the review says "You have access to multi-media functions such as AUDIO/MP3 CD playback, VCD playback, DVD playback and TV Tuner support" which implies that that's all the functions. No MPEG4, for example, and no SVCD. This bios will only read media on CDs as far as I can tell from the review, so you can't play media off a hard drive, USB, memory stick, etc etc. In other words, it will do the things a $80 DVD player from Wal-Mart will do for you, but its output probably won't be as good (I don't see any component output on this baby, but my $80 Pana DVD-S35S is progressive scan, supports VCD, SVCD, XVCD, XSVCD, DVD, MP3, WMA, and JPEG.)
In fact, the reviewer couldn't even figure out how to get the TV feature to autoscan to select only good channels (a feature which might not even be present, for all anyone including soyo will tell us) but was impressed that there was an escape function to go back to the menu. Woop-de-doo!
All in all, this article is unprofessional crap, and the etbios is basically useless. The fact that it has funky bios means that it's likely to be a pain in the ass sometime down the road. This looks like a product looking for a purpose. Were it done right, with access to filesystems not on optical media, and support for additional codecs in some format, it would be interesting, but this product is as goofy as the review.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Instant Music
HTPC motherboard
P4R800
Words to men, as air to birds.
I remember the Mac Classic had System 6 built into a ROM chip that you could boot to if you had no OS installed, or needed some kind of emergency access to the system. Now that was a cool idea.
This is actually a really cool bios update for the VIA chipset(s). VIA demonstrated it at the Lunch @ Pierro's event at COMDEX (and CES for that matter) in Las Vegas a year or two ago. It was designed originally for the EPIA boards, and makes an excellent "brainless" media center. I was lucky enough to be working with several of the folks at VIA during this time, and I have to say they did a damn good job with this BIOS.
Karma: 0 (But I wield a mean +10 Vorpal Apathy)
......Back in the era of the P5, I remember saying that there's absolutelly no reason (cost or technicalities) why the BIOS couldn't axcess & run all media imput & data saving devices, while running the Video card by a generic 800x600 colour VESA driver. Ontop of which there should've been a PAL/NTSC S-Video/RCA TV output connector embedded on the backplane, that communicated with the video card via the PCI bus, complete with embedded hardware that converted the complete desktop (of both the BIOS & any operating systems) to the standard input of PAL/NTSC TVs (so one doesn't have the problem of just getting the top left corner of the desktop on the telly, or only being able to use 480x640)
You see I remember a mate of mine in 1996 having a VGA to RCA converter cable that auto converted the desktop to PAL/NTSC resolutions automatically, using a gizmo box in the middle of the cable that was OS agnostic (it was for showing things like video/game demos & Power Point presentations on large screen tellies)
Surelly once economies of scale are taken into account (of a big firm like Aopen doing this on all there boards), the cost differance wouldn't be more than a dollar or 2, especially with the added demand potential improving economies of scale even more so.
Mind you what was the price of flash memory like in 1996? I've never bought any so I have no idea.Maybe just like VRAM, EDDO-RAM & the emerging SDRAM, flash memory was a lot more expensive back then, meaning BIOSes back them were a 1/4 the size or something. Which of course means everything I typed in the above paragraphs is a bunch of humbug.
Considering that QNX has a 1.44MB bootable demo floppy that has:-
1 A live OS
2 A file system (that I think maybe even now has read/write drivers for QNX's 2 file systems & all the FAT derivitives, plus read-only NTFS support)
3 A very elegant colour graphical enviroment/GUI (that beats the crap out of X-Windows & all the layered crudge now normally ontop of it)
4 Networking capabilities (including drivers for common NICs & dial-up modems)
& 5 a web browser (that even I think now supports a ported Shockwave/Flash plugin, if there's a HDD in the system with the required space formated with a supported file system).
Now even though there's obviously a RAM drive thing going on here, there's no reason why moderm BIOSes can't do the same thing, especially considering contemporary flash RAM sizes mean many BIOSes are to a good degree spare space. From what I remember someone posting here on Slashdot, when this or a very similar topic was previously posted (seems like yonks ago now), some PC flash RAM BIOSes are more than half empty, leading to this potential being investigated, simply as a by-product of finding something productive to do with the left over bytes on the BIOS's flash memory.
more like 98%
BTW I am a Linux software developer and I see this every day.
Of course it has an OS. In fact, it has two of them. BIOS. Bi-OS. Get it?
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Yess! Yet another multimedia toaster. But who wants it? Remember : "...Because a PC is a terrible thing to waste. " (You know Who). So, don't waste it!
There is nothing to say that you need an OS or a bios. Most microprocessor-based device execute code without these.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
I always wanted to see something like this, a PC that didn't have to load an operating system from the hard drive but rather a ROM module. What I believe the computer market needs is right where that Soyo board stands. Something along the lines of an OS-Bus a slot on the motherboard where a ROM chip with an operating system is slotted in. Making the system boot in seconds, only configurations and settings alike would be loaded off the HDD. Linux on a ROM chip and other operating systems, much like embedded systems, should be a future goal IMHO.
http://toastytech.com/guis/qnxdemo.html
http://tinyurl.com/3yjvs
http://tinyurl.com/2xskw
Like someone else mentioned, isn't this just what we had back in the glory days of the Vics and C64s, etc? I remember one of the big reasons I hated DOS back then was actually having to load the OS (on a floppy usually) before you could do anything. On my Commodores, just flick the switch and bang, you got your READY, with a built in BASIC interpreter and all, good stuff.
I really like the concept of a multimedia oriented motherboard.
And, if it wasn't for the fact that I have a modded X-Box that I paid $125 that, for the most part, does all of this except for tv tuning and has the added advantage of playing X-Box games as well. By the time I build this mobo into a case, it's gonna be the same size as an X-Box too...
The review hit the nail on the head, though. If they did the same thing, but made it micro-ATX and threw on on-board wifi, people would jump on it. I know I'm looking for a small multimedia hub for the bedroom. Heck, I don't even want to put a hard drive in it. I just want a shell that will pull stuff off my main PC.
Wise men say, "Forgiveness is divine, but never pay full price for late pizza."
I predict that the whole idea will be resisted, villified and obstructed in every way possible by the Convicted Monopolist. Sir Bill would rather fund a vastly bigger development team than is needed, in order to deal with driver code, than do anything which might help compatability with another OS.
IIRC there was a move about 10 years ago, maybe a bit less, to code the device BIOS (graphics, SCSI etc) in some sort of universal language so that it could be interpreted, or re-compiled into native code for faster execution. I have not heard anything of it since, maybe an idea whose time had not yet come.
The key to doing the whole thing properly of course is that there needs to be a set of standards for the BIOS API, so that every OS can call all the basic functions identically. That should be easy, for example a disc can basically seek, read or write, only three basic operations. It might queue these, with arbitrary priority, which adds a little bit of complexity. It gets messy with 3D graphics.....
Thinking about it, as I have been for years, the correct place to split between BIOS and OS might be at the file system level, the file system (ext3, Reiser, JFS (watch out for false claims about ownership from SCO!), etc, even FAT, should reside in the bios. That way a totally trashed PC can be recovered without the OS, i.e. the OS is truly file system independent and vice versa. It would make for very clean software design. What is more, the access permissions would be handled in the open-sourced BIOS code, all security holes could be filled rapidly.
Next stage, the memory management.....
Taken to its logical conclusion, the OS would be reduced to a mere compatability layer on top of the BIOS. It has a lot of advantages, especially if the hardware write inhibit for the flash is reinstated (used to be a jumper, often not fitted to the motherboard to save next to nothing, and expose people to destruction of their flash by viruses), preferably by a key switch on the front panel, so all updates need manual intervention.
There is a real possibility of a major advance in software quality and security here, as well as the elimination of future hardware incompatabilities, somehow I don't think it will happen, because it will not be to the liking of the small-minded Monopolist with the large bank balance. Until M$ are eradicated from the face of the earth, they will remain as a major obstacle to each and every form of progress, as do all Illegal Monopolies.
So what you're saying is I don't need to boot up my TV anymore?
If you look at something like OpenFirmware (http://www.openfirmware.org/), the idea of a BIOS as OS has been around for quite a while. OpenFirmware has been the "BIOS" on Sun SPARCs since they were introduced.
I have been reading up on the history of the Apple II and it seemes that each peripheral card had a ROM which held its "driver" code. Most of this was mapped to an area of fake memory that looked different to each card, so most of a card's code did not need to be relocatable.
if you have ever tried to program low level you will find that there already is bios routines to do alot of things, in old PCS. like putpixel, setpixel, and bring up a certain video mode.
problem was, putpixel and setpixel in bios were incredibyl slow, because the bios hardware is incredibly slow. putpixel in software was just faster.
you should have to tyep 20 commands into the unix shell before u can play a cd. why dumb it down
Atleast here in Norway, adding a TV-tuner to the bundle results in an annual tax of about $270. Thats why I removed the tuner in my TV with a soldering-iron. I only watch DVDs anyway.
A GUI based OS should not have a CLI available.
Well-known scripting systems such as Bash and Perl could in theory be interpreted as command-line interfaces. I know of only two ways to interpret this statement: Either "An operating system that includes a graphical user interface should have no way to automate tasks," or "I am willing to reply to tepples's comment, describing something vastly superior to well-known scripting systems for automating tasks in a graphical operating system."
If you have a remotely decent monitor, there's no problem [with delay after switching resolutions].
Value priced computers do not come packed with a "remotely decent" monitor. I guess that by calling the optional feature of different resolutions for different workspaces worthless in practice, I underestimated the percentage of "remotely decent" monitors on the market, given that two PC monitors I have owned have not been "remotely decent" with respect to downtime after a resolution switch.
from an end-user perspective, switching from Gnome to twm is at _least_ as big a change as switching from Windows to (say) KDE on Linux.
For one thing, the end-user perspective isn't the whole deal here because device drivers will still work. For another, there exist desktop environments that lie somewhere between the primitive twm and a full GNOME installation.
The five-year-old computer presumably has an existing operating system; it doesn't need a new one.
The problem here is that few companies still publish applications for Windows intended to run on the five-year-old computers that schools still have. Many X11 apps, on the other hand, seem to demand much less RAM. (No, just because top counts VRAM in its total doesn't make X11 a memory hog.)
you can switch from Windows to Linux/XFree, if you are so inclined
Many popular brands of video cards seem to work in accelerated mode more reliably on Microsoft Windows than on XFree86. In addition, I'm still bitter that Microtek hasn't provided any information about Scanmaker 4850 scanners to the SANE project.
You're probably looking at the extreme low end, the sort of monitor that's bundled with computers that include a bundled monitor, the ones that have less than sixteen inches (diagonal) of viewable picture space, e.g., the cheapest of the cheap of "17-inch" monitors (the ones that are like 15.3" viewable or whatever)
Close. This is a nominally 17" Proview CRT that I bought for $200 about three and a half years ago. Its visible area is a bit over 15" diagonal. It has taken two seconds to switch frequencies ever since I bought it.
A five-year-old computer, in addition to already having an OS, might also already have some apps installed, perhaps, don't you think?
Then what happens when I want to add an app to the computer? What happens when I receive a document in a format created by a newer version of a particular app that the version installed on my computer can't read? What if it's a donated computer whose hard drive has been wiped?
Yes, some projects do do this, in some cases because the problem domain is such that it is possible
The problem domains such that what I want is possible are wider than some expect. Does anybody really need 1 GHz for a chkdsking word processor or spreadsheet?
but in general I don't think it's realistic to expect all new software to run on arbitrarily old hardware. New wine, old wineskins. If you want to run all of the latest and greatest software
I don't want to run the latest and greatest software; I just want to install software at all on a hard drive that has been wiped for donation.
This doesn't make old hardware useless; you just use the software you've already got.
"The software I've already got" has known vulnerabilities whose only patch is an upgrade to a new operating system that requires computers that cost $1,000 per seat that I don't have.