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Jumping to Conclusions on BIOS, Phoenix, and Windows
tomlasusa writes "In a post on LinuxQuestions.org, user 'chessonly' cites a 2003 article from Networkcomputing.com by writer Steven J. Schuchart as evidence of that Phoenix Technologies has made its BIOS more Windows-friendly — thereby locking out users from using other OSs. In a rebuttal posted at nwc.com, Schuchart says that this is just not true."
The title for this article gave me an idea...
I need Slashdotter's opinion on this: what do you think of a "jump to conclusions" mat? I could make millions!
A Slashdot post about a Digg story? Now we really have gone too far.
Every time specs, or the workings of any piece of PC hardware changes, a certain part of the OSS community cries foul, or says its "Windows-friendly" because MSFT is (quite predictably) out of the gate with support.
Hardware development isn't going to stop just because 4 out of 5 kernel devs agree to release a driver as stable.
I think the programmer side of the community is flexible enough to deal with hardware changes, and it's just that annoying end-user whining because he wants hardware X to work today, and the fact that he doesnt have it proves some world conspiracy against him.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
It saves time, and is often correct.
At the risk of being modded troll...
The article basically says "a post made by a clueless chap on a forum is almost certainly conplete twaddle. I wouldn't have even written this but his post quotes me."
So, IOW: the article is one big "nothing happened"
How is this news?
From what I can tell, there's a bug with the user's laptop and some "USB-to-serial thing" according to his forum post. Whatever it did, it managed to get the BIOS to set a password. The user decides this is because they installed Linux, and the BIOS is "only for Windows Vista" and therefore locks out non-Windows OSes.
He then links to another post as "proof" which you'll not never mentions any non-Windows OS. My guess is that it's the "USB-to-serial thing" that's causing some bug in the BIOS that corrupts parts of the CMOS, causing a password to be set. (As an added bonus, if it's truly random data, it could be an untypable password.)
So, nothing to do with running Linux, and everything to do with the "USB-to-serial" thing that the user used. At least, that's my guess.
You are in a maze of twisty little relative jumps, all alike.
What this BIOS porbably does (apart form the mentioned updates on the webpage) is add the SLIC data for Toshiba into the BIOS. All OEM venders need to have the SLIC data in the ACPI section of the BIOS so they can use thier OEM Digital Certificates that they supply on the Install for Vista DVD's. The Digital Certificate allows Vista to be instantly activated on a PC with the SLIC data, VLK, and Digital Cert.
They are just covering thier own backs that on the slight chance that the data changes in the ACPI could cause some crap on other OS'es. The user probably set a password, or corrputed his BIOS during the flash phase, and is pointing fingers at anyone else so he no longer looks like a dumbass.
I get this all the time with people who bring thier CellPhones in for repair becuase they locked thier phones and forgot thier password. They state clearly that they never changed it, and when I load the phone into my PST's and retreive the code the look of realization comes over them and say, "oh yeah, I remember it now"
This special place in hell you speak of... Is it right next to the level they reserve for child molesters and people who talk at the theate?