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No EFI Support for Vista
DietFluffy writes "Microsoft revealed today that it will not support EFI booting for Windows Vista on its launch. The news will be a shock for owners of Intel Macs who had hoped they would be able to dual-boot between Windows Vista and OS X. Intel Macs only support booting via EFI."
Would it be possible to create some kind of bios level switcher so that dual-botting would be possible?
I'm not at all excited by the idea of shutting down my computer just to use another operating system.
Anybody who's used a virtualization product like VMWare knows what I'm talking about. That is where it's at.
You can run another operating system in a window without leaving your current OS. It's not an emulator in any traditional sense of the word; things run at (or a few percent shy of) native speed. The only downside is that you need enough RAM to run both operating systems simultaneously in a comfortable fashion, but 2GB of RAM is under $200 these days.
I'm going to buy an Intel Mac as soon as VMWare releases an OSX version of VMWare or an open-source implementation reaches that level of quality (there are some strong contenders). I'm willing to put down the cash to run Windows on an Intel Mac, but dual-booting isn't even part of the equation.
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I guess this means that someone is going to have to hack a Linux bootloader to boot Windows. Maybe something with elilo. It's be kinda cool for these guys to say, "Sure. You can run Windows on an Intel Mac. You just gotta install Linux first!"
What is mankind really? Well, it's just two words put together Mank, and ind.
And does this really come as a suprise to anyone anyway? "Oh my God! Someone tries to update the x86 architecture in a meaningful way and Microsoft arrives late to the Party: Drunk, kicking, and screaming! Who knew that might happen?"
I know it's the fashionable thing to do, but the whole article summary is a troll. I can't imagine all that many people are buying Intel Macs because there's a chance they might boot Windows, or rather any one who is going to be shocked-SHOCKED! if they can't. Not out in the real - not /. - world anyway. Some might be a bit miffed perhaps. I would hope that those who do want to dual boot Windows and OS X are savvy enough to wait to see if it's actually going to be possible before making a purchase. If not, well, sad for them but they have a pretty good OS and machine. I'm sure there'll be some sort of virtualisation environment available which will probably make for a more useful experience than dual booting anyway - much easier to share stuff between OSes when you can run both at the same time. Using Windows on my PC via RDC on one of my Macs is often more convenient than flipping between machines using my KVM.
:-). I only know one or two first time Mac buyers who have been waiting for a spread of Intel Macs ( i.e. mini, iMac and MacBook ) to choose from. None of them seem to be particularly interested in running Windows on their new machines.
;-).
:-).
Many of the people I'm aware of who are buying Intel Macs are people who have been hanging out for a pepped up PowerBook. There are a few who seem to be getting them because they're the "new Mac", more money than sense
I have a 17" Intel iMac, which I got as a replacement machine from Apple for my DTK prototype Intel Mac. It's a great little machine. I have no intention at all of booting Windows on it - that's what my PC is for
BTW, does anyone know where the "shocked-SHOCKED!" thing ( not necessarily with my capitalisation ) came from? I've seen quite a few people saying/writing it, and the only place in the popular media, if you will, that I've seen it is in the movie "High Fidelity" where Joan Cusack says it when having lunch with the Laura character. Is that where it came from? It's been buggin' me
Regards,
Jo Meder
I've read countless comments about the superiority of EFI (and Open Firmware) and how much the BIOS sucks, but I still haven't found anyone explaining how exactly they are superior, and why exactly the BIOS sucks, except that EFI is newer and better. And that OF has a Forth interpreter. (How many people have ever used that, honestly?)
Incidently, for all the superiority of Open Firmware, most Macs of the past few years can't even boot from USB. While a coworker showed me a 4 year old Compaq D510 desktop with a bog standard BIOS booting and flawlessly running a pirated OS X 10.4.3 from an USB hard disk.
As far as I'm concerned, the only thing the BIOS has to do is to be able to find the boot sector of a boot device for the real OS. Anything else is handled better by the OS. What exactly is the advantage of moving to EFI?
Supporting EFI would be supporting competition. Incentive to abandon Microsoft.
"I want a computer that's good for gaming and graphics. Either PC or the new Intel Mac, which I'd dual boot, OS X for gfx, Vista for games."
EFI supported:
"So, supposedly Mac is better for gfx than PC, let's try it... Wow, this OS X rocks and Vista sucks. I'm gonna get a PS3 for games and drop Vista altogether, staying with OS X."
EFI not supported:
"Well, there is Photoshop for Vista and no games for OS X, so I'd better buy a PC so I have both games and photoshop. Well, it sucks, but I bet OS X would suck just the same if I ever tried it."
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
As I understand it, one of central features of EFI was the hardware level encryption and digital signing happening between core motherboard components, an intergral part of the Trusted Computing Platform implementation - which Windows Vista was supposed to fully support? If Vista has to use the old BIOS architecture is there hope still for freedom or is there another way to tie us onto the TC-shackles?
And does this mean Apple's products will be the only ones that fully implement the TC platform idea both in hardware and operating system level. I seem to remember the Macintosh launch involved an ad related to the year 1984, can't seem to remember exactly what it was about (mind blanked out)...
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
Adding EFI support would allow people to run dual boot Windows and OSX on Apple hardware the next time they purchase a computer.
Worse case for Microsoft would be that they try OSX, like it and then gradually migrate across to it.
If they don't support EFI, then there is no good and legal way of running both on one machine. You could use software based solutions, but none of them are as good as a dual boot machine.
As such, if you want to jump from Windows to OSX, it requires significant cash investment - something which a lot of people (myself included) aren't prepared to do.
</tinfoil hat>
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I'm really worried now! It seems like almost every feature boasted in Vista has been pulled. Database filesystem and all that? What will be left that isn't essentially Windows XP with a much larger greed for memory and other hardware requirements?
Ya I agree the other four or five hundred changes and new features don't mean anything, is it all about the 4 or 5 features that were removed or speculated on that won't make it in the shipping version.
The difference between Vista and XP is as vast as the jump from Win3.1 to NT. Developers are still trying to get a grip on the new technologies the platform offers. Everything from a new API on every level to a graphics subsystem that is doing things others haven't even thought of yet.
Is everyone really this jaded? Even if you hate MS, then you won't be running Vista anyway, so why in the hell are you wasting your time commenting on something that really doesn't concern you.
Now here is my RANT on EFI, and I am sticking it in this post...
EFI support is also a big 'secret' crap. There have already been EFI based WindowsXP computers shipped, all it takes is a XP compatibile boot extender added to the EFI firmware. After the freaking HD boots, XP handles all the hardware anyway, it doesn't need BIOS and it certainly doesn't need EFI managing drivers.
This is the dirty secret people don't get, it isn't that XP or Vista can't do EFI, it is the Apple/Intel system are not going to drop in extra code in the firmware for the XP boot extender as other manufacturer that have already shipped EFI based XP machines did.
What is great about EFI? It is going to help Apple for locking in of hardware and driver stability, but for OSes like Linux or Windows, it is pretty much crap. The only thing EFI does better than BIOS is that is will do the initial startup faster, as BIOS is slower enumerating the devices, etc, even a fast BIOS with this crap turned off. That is the big wow of EFI for non-Mac world people.
EFI is supposed to replace BIOS, but when you look at what it is doing, it is actually a step back in technology, as instead of just turning on the system and handing over all operations to the OS, it actually steps in and tries to do more in place of the OS. This is what OSes have fought to get past for years and have done so, and now we are back to a standard that is wanting to do this again. What are people thinking?
The OS should handle this stuff, and that has been a purposeful shift to make the technological jump from platforms like DOS and Win3.1 that depended on BIOS operations to OSes like NT that don't give a crap about the BIOS other than it initializing the boot sector, and from there, it is the OSes responsibility.
Yes I understand BIOS, and how many features like Timings etc have moved into the BIOS as they became dynamic, but that doesn't mean we need to move drivers or other non-needed functions into EFI.
Look at the problems with ACPI even, and yet there are features of ACPI that are quite cool and yet still not even used on most PCs.
Sorry for the rant, but I find this all so foolish.
#1) Why do Mac users care? Windows users are not licking their chops over Mac/Intels that are performing below the average Windows PC currently sold.
#2) XP and Vista can run on EFI machinies, all it takes is the boot to be in the EFI firmware to hand off to XP or Vista.
#3) There are already XP machines that are BIOS free and are EFI already on the market.
#4) EFI has some real issues in moving things out of the OS that just shouldn't be so hardware specific.
#5) Mac and Intel are the ones with the buzz on this, and it is Mac that is not going to put a loader in their firmware for XP or Vista.
#6) Vista actually does FULLY support EFI even without the extra boot extender, but only in the 64bit version, but the reason this doesn't help, there are no 64bit Intel Macs.
(Which is quite laughable, as Mac/Intel systems are ONLY 32bit, even though Apple t
I once thought I could get away without 3.5 floppies anymore. I was wrong.
:), when I had to install a winxp on one of our new machines that came with sata drives and raid controllers, winxp needed driver floppies for both. I guess it will be a wonderous day when windows installer will be able to read from opical drives, hdds, partitions, ftp/nfs/samba/http shares, or give you a usable booting environment.
In my virtual crusade againt windows installers in this century, have to add that the only thing you really need floppy disks these days is the windows installer, since it can not load drivers from anything else than drive a
Other than that, there has not been FDDs in my machines I use for more than 6 years now. Flashing bios can be done by booting from cd/dvd or usb.
Last time I needed an FDD was, nobody would guess
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
If motherboard manufacturers suddenly moved away from the old BIOS to EFI, wouldn't this create problems for Vista which is meant to be a mostly re-coded OS which supports all kinds of new technology?!
:/ Kinda annoying, but I use OS X exclusively now anyway so no skin off of my nose :)
Do mobo makers have leverage in this area?! Or is it likely to be the other way round, "This motherboard doesn't support Vista, I ain't buying it" kinda scenario.
I am guessing the latter, but if everyone was educated enough about PC's, coupled with knowledge of other OS's, it could be the other way around.
ah well
Jan
Jan
The device drivers are held in EFI flash memory right at the lowest level of the machine, and cannot be changed (at least, not by you) without rendering the machine unbootable.
EFI is just the latest move by Intel to completely lock down the PC platform and implement DRM at (or near) the hardware level. These days, if you see Intel's name on any spec you can bet your ass that it will be full of this kind of shit. It think it was sometime in the mid 90s that Intel stop making hardware to benefit the user, and started designing better handcuffs.
Support the demands to ensure that any Trusted Computing hardware you purchase always comes with the master key to ensure that *you* can always unlock it. Those who need secrecy and demand that their machines are unaltered (intelligence services for example) can restrict who gets the keys for their machines and get the security benefits. Everyone else still keeps control of their computers.
As Alan Cox said "If you don't have the keys, this isn't about security."
Come on, support for optical drives? Or even networking? Do you have an idea how long it takes to load drivers for every single NIC ever produced? Because that's what you have to do in order to support networking from a boot CD - at least it appears that Microsoft is thinking like that. I'd really appreciate them to finally discover hardware detection and put that on the boot CD.
And for the installation not mysteriously hanging when executed on my system, leaving me unable to fix my Windows for the new mainboard.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Plus, if there's anything to be learned from the whole OS/2 experience it's that perfect emulation of your rival's platform brings no market advantage.
Well, it's not really a very good comparison because Apple is primarily a hardware company, or complete solutions if you will. Yes, if they were trying to sell OS X it would be a bad idea. If you are trying to sell Mac boxes, I think it's a good idea.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I hate to rain on you MS-trashing party, but Microsoft already DOES support EFI. EFI is, after all, a PC technology, developed for the Itanium, not something Apple designed for their systems. The summary of the article is quite simply wrong. Vista will support EFI in the 64-bit version, for 64-bit chips, this being a technology designed for a 64-bit processor. In fact 64-bit XP and 2003 ALREADY support EFI. What will not be supported is EFI on 32-bit chips, since no one is doing that except Apple.
OS independant device drivers sounds like a big plus to me.
That explains why Microsoft doesn't support it. Driver support can often be a problem with other OS's. When all OS's could use the same driver Microsoft would loose their advantage.
Plain and simple. Microsoft knows that if you can run Windows on a Mac, more people may actually purchase a Mac. Then the comparison will start, and in my opinion, end very quickly. OS X is and will be light years ahead of Vista and Microsoft knows this.
Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is the modern and flexible successor to the 20-year-old PC BIOS. It is responsible for initialising hardware in the PC, and importantly, device drivers are stored in the EFI flash memory rather than being loaded by the operating system. It is a major change for the PC industry and both PC makers and Microsoft have been slow to make the switch.
Obviously, the only real advantage that Microsoft has over other operating systems is that you and plug anything into it and Windows will recognize the device.
If you take the device drivers out of Windows and put them in EFI, then there is a level playing field for operating systems.
I'm writing this on a G5 running OS X 10.4, a 64-bit OS on a 64 bit machine, and I've had this box since 2003. My 2001 laptop has 802.11b built in (as configured), and I bought that after seeing it on some laptops in 1999. When did you get 802.11b on your laptop, child?
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You are quite lucky, sir. I've had incredible problems with exactly this: the BIOS installers are generally poorly written pieces of proprietary and unreliable garbage which do not handle even the slightest deviation from their standard use, such as putting them on a CD.
Fortunately, the 64-bit system I trashed the BIOS on this way was a test box: it turned out to be simpler to open up the boxes and temporarily install a floppy drive for exactly this use.
I spoke to a chap about 9 months ago on shacknews.com and hardocp.com about Vista, ... apparently the MS team who handle the F6 floppy / SATA / install section of the installer didn't (and still don't!) realise there's a problem with needing a fucking FLOPPY disk to install the storage drivers!
The chap on the team who is / was a friend of the guy I spoke to said he needed proof or some kind of evidence (large thread? web petition?) to convince the rest of his team / management that installing drivers from USB or CD is smart.
So to summarise, there's still a small chance if this team doesn't wake the fuck up - we could be pressing F6 and installing a 3.5" drive temporarily everytime we install Windows - STILL
for goodness sakes.....
(yes I know this is all heresay but I really have no reason to lie)
Steve Jobs actually tried this with NextStep, and learned a painful lesson. While NextStep was heralded for its stability and features on the Next hardware, as soon as it was "out in the wild" on commodity hardware, it was pretty much panned as a buggy, slow, cumbersome piece of garbage that never really sold or gained any major following.
There were a few reasons for this.
First off, the people who went out of their way to buy a Next box, much like macheads, had already decided that it was a wonderful machine before they ever turned it on, so were a bit more forgiving than someone just trying out the OS alongside others.
Secondly, it is a lot easier to develop an OS that only needs to run on one or two motherboards, with one or two chips, and one or two graphics systems, than it is to develop something that has to work with everything.
Thirdly, if you have complete control of the hardware, you can cheat on a lot of things. For example, if you know a feature crashes horribly on anything under a certain amount of RAM, then you can hold back that feature on any system that doesn't have enough RAM to handle it. When the user has control of the hardware, all you can do is make recommendations, and hope they abide by them, which almost without doubt, some won't.
Lastly, the number of bugs and problems you have to fix is limited to the number of users that have problems. Every piece of software as complex as an OS has bugs, if you have a few thousand users, the chances of them running across all the bugs is a lot smaller than if you have tens of thousands of users.
All of this, at the very least, taught Steve Jobs that trying to be Microsoft is harder than it looks. I think that Apple would probably make a ton of money if they could release their OS as a software product for commodity PCs, and would probably put a HUGE dent in the Linux market. However, I don't know if the company is really up to handling that, and I am quite sure that from his Next experience Jobs realizes the danger of trying to make that move when you aren't ready for it.
Isn't this good news for AMD? The reason Intel developed EFI, after all, was to patent it and require AMD to license it from Intel, right? Now AMD doesn't have to license it in order to run Windows.
The chap on the team who is / was a friend of the guy I spoke to said he needed proof or some kind of evidence (large thread? web petition?) to convince the rest of his team / management that installing drivers from USB or CD is smart.
How about the fact that many computers today do not come with a floppy drive pre-installed, but have optical drives and on-board SATA? Hell, I've seen computers without PS/2 ports: you must use a USB keyboard and mouse. In some ways this is a lot better. Get rid of the legacy connections that while potentially useful, are not necessary. Same with the floppy. Why should a manufacturer spend $5 on a floppy when they can simply not put one in and charge the same price?
The real issue, as this thread demonstrates, is that the software manufacturers still rely on legacy technology.
24 beers in a case, 24 hours in a day. Coincidence? I think not!
Actually, the MS team who handled that as of when I left did, (and still does!) get that there's a problem with needing a fucking FLOPPY disk to install the storage drivers. I had the (mis?)fortune of trying to get it changed.
But the reality was that when Windows XP originally shipped, 5 years ago, this wasn't a problem on the immediate horizon. And when the service packs for XP and Server 2003 shipped, it was WAY to risky of a change for us to implement. And Longhorn was "right around the corner", where F6 from other media would be (and is, in current betas) supported.
BTW - your second paragraph amused me. Made me feel like I was Ferris Bueller.
I've got a PowerBook at the moment, and will definitely be upgrading to a Macbook Pro in the near future. Being able to run MS Windows on it at (near) native speed would be a huge bonus for me, but I've got zero interest in dual booting to get that. I don't give a rats ass about running games under windows; I hardly have enough free time in my life to play WoW on my PowerBook more than a few times a week (without getting into trouble with my other half).
...... QEMU + Accelerator seems to be the only choice for Intel OSX right now. VMware are apparently showing interest (but nothing solid yet) and another outfit called iEmulator.com are supposed to have an Intel port of their existing Mac OSX product in the pipeline.
:-)
What I really need it for is those work occasions where I run into equipment that needs a dedicated Windows app to manage it, and dual-booting to deal with that is just stupid. I need a good native virtual environment I can just fire up in a minute, do my work and then close it down. VPC on PowerPC just doesn't cut it. It's way too slow.
The things I'm keeping an eye on
If Xen worked I'd be delighted, but there seem to be problems that are going to take some time to work out. 1) there is no Intel VT support in the current Intel Mac's, and 2) Moshe Bar has said that "OS X has its own virtualization technology that interferes with Xen". Apparently he's been able to get FreeBSD and Debian working, but Apple's protectiveness of its hardware specs has so far prevented Bar from getting the graphics, sound or Wi-Fi to work.
So it's really only a matter of time
Ok, really quickly, here we go:
A) Have you looked at all the chips Intel makes? Their roadmap is more complicated than a Los Angeles freeway! I assure you, testing on the Core Duo and Core Solo processors they are curently using is by no means a an indication that there won't be any problems with any other Intel chips. First off, those are 32-bit chips, and Intel has a couple different flavors of 64-bit chip out there. Then there are all the extra features of the various chips that at the OS level can cause real problems if you don't properly compile and optimize. And this isn't even getting into the AMD products!
B) Ignoring for a moment the "MS steal from it all the time" troll, the kernel of OSX has been around for quite a while, and most of it was not written by Apple. It is basically BSD. A LOT of the features of OSX are very new (in OS terms), and have really never been tested in the sense of the kind of abuse features in Windows get with hundreds of millions of people banging on them all the time.
C) Apple never made their own chip! The used off the shelf Motorola chips, then they used off the shelf IBM chips, now they use off the shelf Intel chips. Apple never made their own harddrives, or video cards, or much of anything. At least not for over a decade. Everything Apple has been doing since the move to PowerPC is following standards set by consortiums. That hasn't really changed.
Yes, the rewards are huge, but many a company have tried to market their OS as software, and many a company have failed. Solaris, OS2, NextStep, BeOS, AT&T UNIX, BSD, Linux, and some others I am sure I have forgotten have all made a run at the boxed software market, and not many of them are around anymore.
By the way, no OSX is not based on Linux, it is based on NextStep, which in turn was based on BSD, both of which had their own run at the PC market, and both of which didn't even get as far as Linux has.
Elilo is probably your best bet. It does Linux on macs and there is no reason I can think of why you should be able to boot another os with it. I will have to wait to figure it out cuz the macbooks are in horribly short supply in my neck of the woods..
u nce&ANN_user_op=view&ANN_id=95
http://www.geeknet.nl/phpws/index.php?module=anno
has some links on this.
-if at first you don't succeed, stay the heck away from paragliding.
Running Windows and OSX (and Linux) on the same machine would be great, but I'm not interested in dual booting.
Dual booting means the computer has to be restarted every single time you need something in the alternate OS. I dual boot XP and Linux now: it bites, and I just don't get to Linux very much since I mostly use XP for work.
I'm using MS's VirtualPC on the same box. I have pretty much every OS they've made since Win95 available instantly (multiple versions in some cases) with little or no performance hit, and I can run as many at a time as I need. I can mark virtual disks readonly, so hosing an OS doesn't mean a reinstall or reimage (and "reimaging" is just replacing a disk file with a backup copy and restarting anyway.)
Realistically, it's better for most purposes than running the OS directly. If I could do that from OSX I'd buy a MacTel tomorrow (well, this year) and make my current white box Linux only. Otherwise I'll probably wait several years, at least until my last PPC machine dies.
And WINE's progress is a poor example. Part of the reason for its slow pace is that there hasn't really been as strong a need for it as there is today. Until Intel-based Macs appeared, there was no real compelling need for WINE - it ran on x86 boxes that could boot Windows anyway. Now we have x86 boxes that can't boot Windows, WINE's API-level Windows app support is a somewhat interesting for Mac users.
I think this is an excellent point that can't be said enough.
WINE suffers, at least right now, from a rather limited appeal. The only people I've run into who use it regularly, are pretty hardcore Linux users who are adamant about not wanting to reboot into Windows in order to use some app, or run a game. I've played around with it (well, Cedega anyway) enough to get WoW working on a Linux machine, because I bought it bare-bones and wasn't about to buy a Windows license just for one game.
But it's a limited market of people who have a regular Intel PC and won't just reboot in Windows.
There is going to be a huge untapped market for a MacWINE variant, that will run Windows applications on the new Intel Macs. I think this market is far in excess of the existing Linux-user demand, and Mac users won't hesitate to pay for a product that does this elegantly and well. In short, there's a big space right now for a company to jump in (maybe Cedega would license their codebase, if the company was scared of the GPL) and produce a commercial product for running Windows applications on Mac.
I think you could probably sell a product like that, even if it only ran a few PC-only applications (but if it ran those applications well and you clearly advertised which it would run) for upwards of $100 a seat. A lot would depend on packaging and support -- I don't think that Cedega-style forums are going to cut it for a Mac-using audience.
If there are a dozen groups possibly working on something like that right now, as you suggest, they're doing it damn quietly. I suppose we're still pretty early in the Intel transition yet, though.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Someone has never looked at how the Mac market reacts to crap. How many non-native software projects have done decently? Microsoft Word 6.0, because it was necessary, and people vocally LOATHED it, and Firefox, because the team went far out of their way to make it look and act native (to the point that every other platform has to deal with certain OS X-isms).
OpenOffice hasn't done jack on the Mac platform, because Mac users don't want to use sofware that looks and acts like crap. Poor on-screen display, no integration with the system, etc. Yet for some reason you think running Windows, even in a virtualization environment side-by-side, will appeal to the vast majority of users?
The total userbase may be flat, but the software market is very dynamic. Based on what software is on my drive today versus several years ago, I'd say there is plenty of life for Mac application developers. Some things on my system haven't changed - MS Office, Adobe Photoshop (Elements, thank goodness), and Quicken (how I *wish* there was a decent alternative). Others have changed drasticly - backup software (Retrospect -> Super Duper), disk utilities (Norton -> DiskWarrior), every internet application I use (several times!), even something as mundane as my Palm sync software.
Mac users appreciate great stuff. Make it, and they'll switch. They won't switch to virtualization day-to-day, or poorly ported applications that were obviously never meant for their platform.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Gee, you must work for a movie studio, because most people certainly don't have the cashola lying around to spring for a rig like that. Which means yes, maybe your hardware under XP64 works because you paid a premium for it... not unlike the Apple situation. Meanwhile, I still can't find an XP64 driver for my wireless network card, so I run any Win64 programs (what Win64 programs? there aren't even 64-bit versions of most popular plugins for IE64) under VMware under Linux instead. I suppose your "solution" to that problem would be to string around 10 Gigabit Ethernet running over optical fiber to a gold-plated NIC. It's a nice sentiment, but it has zero connection with the Real World.
Meanwhile, all my Linux applications (well, the open source ones, anyway) run natively 64-bit now. And it's smoking nice.
You should buy better motherboards. Most modern motherboards from good manufacturers support BIOS flashing from CD, in Windows, etc. I haven't had a floppy drive hooked to a computer in 3 or 4 years now.
Recursive: Adj. See Recursive.
What are the current stats? Windows at about 96% and Mac at about 1% (the rest unix/linux)
Where'd you get this from? Seriously. I'd be interested to know.
concrete5: a cms made for marketing, but strong enough for geeks.
It is interesting that there are many technical comments that claim that Windows actually can boot from EFI, but I think you defined most clearly that main point here.
Microsoft won't ever officially support Windows on new Apple computers, period. We could find it quite funny, but Microsoft is _clearly_ afraid of already so big comparing between OS X and Vista, so they don't want any additional troubles. And it is not that they afraid from Apple fanboys, no, they are afraid that some CIO will buy new, shinny PowerBook, as he will be heard that those "expensive, but cool toys" could run operational system that he is found of (or he is used to) and then...bums!...he loads OS X. And suddenly he understands.
There is other operational systems than Windows! There are other systems! And heck, they can be even BETTER ones!
Yes, I made it a little bit dramatical, but Microsoft is afraid from Apple. Again. This time they should be, because people don't want simple blank, confused computers. And even if they own shares in Apple (which I personally think is worth now quite a money, but is not about money at all this time), they are not happy about what power Apple under Jobs have appeared to be.
Ohh, I didn't finish what people want. They want entertament systems. In my opinion, I would like to claim that PC market is already very saturated for this level and have reached maximum. Future belongs to consoles (for games), easy to use web systems (we have very useful webmail, productivity packages on the web, thank to small-to-big but new companies like Google), Nokia 770 and that new Microsoft thingy... Mobile, easy to use devices. Yes, laptops will stay, and will take place of PCs. MacMinis.
For me, Microsoft Windows is clearly at dinosaur level. It is meant to disappear. Question is - what will stay in his place. So far, Vista does very bad job to prove that it can be that one.
user@ubuntubox:~$ stfu This server is going down for shutdown NOW!