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Bypass Windows With Fast-Boot Technology
thatnerdguy writes "Phoenix Technologies, a developer of BIOS software, is working on a new technology called Hyperspace that will allow you to instantly load certain applications like email, web browser and media player, without loading windows. It could even lead to tailoring of computers to even more specific demographics, like a student laptop preloaded with word processor, email and an IM all available at the press of a button." Why is this story setting off alarms in my brain?
It's like travelling back in time 40 years!
which is totally what she said
About ten minutes... but then again, most people with an interest in hacking those systems are doing it to put Linux or something on them.
Bears don't normally eat things that talk and move backwards.
Would this be like some kind of non-malicious root kit?
That's not "fast-boot technology". It's "just another software program". One with a great purpose, but not worth distinguishing as "technology".
Apology to Ubuntu forum.
Wait! Wait! We're still relevant. x86 BIOS is still useful for some things!
"Phoenix is currently in talks with most major PC manufacturers, with the notable exception of Apple."
Because (at the risk of being accused of Trolling), Apple will eventually bring out iRightNow which will pretty much do the same thing but in White only and at three times the price?
AT&ROFLMAO
Load applications quickly without loading windows?
Isn't this called Linux?
Seriously though, it really is old technology.
http://www.linuxbios.org/
Bears don't normally eat things that talk and move backwards.
This sounds very similar to virtualization technologies being developed that allow an application, say a database, to run in a virtual environment on a server without having an underlying OS. Why not virtualize a desktop as well? Why not run a simple OS with networking capabilities?
My concern would be data security, as if you wanted to run a word processor or any app that needs access to your hard drive or thumb drive, you would have to have appropriate security built into the miniOS to handle reading and writing. An option would be to provide some onboard flash storage for Hyperspace to use. How much can you enable the end user to customize the user experience without opening up the system to security risks?
Why boot up a bloated OS just to check your mail or run instant messenger? Sandbox every application that boots this way, and you increase your security, raise your battery life, whiten your teeth, etc.
People always say, "Well all this person does is check email! Why do they need a fancy computer/operating system/office suite." The real question should be, why do they need an OS at all?
I love my desktop, and I'll probably keep one until they get something that I can wear that does all the same stuff, but I'm fricking sick to death of dealing with people's computer issues, when they only really need a web browser. Handing out knoppix disks works well enough, as a stopgap, but reducing things to a more simple state is highly desirable.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Windows is an OS (I'm being kind), that means there's all sorts of things that run on top of it behind the scenes most users neither know nor care about. Things like a firewall and anti-virus. Quite necessary if Phoenix are suggesting you might run an email client on this thing.
Similarly I don't think there's ever a time when I want to run just a word processor. I want an MP3 player for some tunes. I want a web browser for fact checking. I want Freecell because I'm lazy and rarely do any actual word processing.
Basically what I'm saying is that I want a proper OS, not something that runs one app at a time. I doubt I'm alone in that. Now, give me a decent OS that runs lots of things loaded into an area of Flash memory so it starts up quickly and I'm yours.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
When you said console I took it to mean command line interface rather than a 'games console'. Mold your language for the slashdot demographic if you're going to post on slashdot man!
which is totally what she said
"There's absolutely no reason you should be waiting the three-plus minutes it takes your computer to boot up Windows, says Woody Hobbs, CEO of Phoenix Technologies."
Sleep mode takes care of this while preserving the full functionality of your setup. Why have a hobbled OS?
I think this will be no more than toy - BIOS manufacturers often introduce neat features that are dropped and forgotten.
For example:
- Ancient versions of AMIBIOS had a Windows 3.11-like mouse-operated GUI (I had one on a 486 PC purchased in 1995). It was a lot easier to use than "modern" text-based BIOSes in 2007. And if the computer had no mouse, you could use the keyboard for navigation.
- I bought an ASUS motherboard about six years ago and it had a feature that spoke about any failures, e.g. no video card or bad memory, instead cryptic beeps that are common today.
Besides, phones and PDAs are "boot" faster not because the initialization procedure is faster (my PDA boots in about 30 seconds) but because they sleep instead of powering off.
Nasty issues to be handled in embedded BIOS applications:
I guess you can cram this in 4M of flash if you are top notch programmer, 128M if you are not. Either way the hardware won't add more than $20 to the cost of the laptop, so I suppose it is a good thing, as long as you can disable it.
It does open an interesting option: If a user only needs email and web access, they don't need to install an OS at all.
I'm sorry, I can't use that word processor. It doesn't support my video card?
All programs evolve until they can send email.
INCLUDING your BIOS!
i did a clean install of Slackware-12 without debus, without HAL and without udev, and built a custom kernel (2.6.23) trimming the fat (removing unneeded features & removing unneeded hardware support) and built most of it as modules except for filesystem support (ext3) which was built in to the kernel itself making an initrd unnecessary, and my system boots up in about 10 to 12 seconds, i did not time it with a fancy chronograph but i did watch it boot while keeping a close eye on a large wallclock...
the only thing i have to do without debus, hal & udev is mount removable drives manually (the old fashioned way)
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
It could even lead to tailoring of computers to even more specific demographics, like a student laptop preloaded with word processor, email and an IM all available at the press of a button.
It was commonplace for early home computers to come with applications in firmware. BASIC programming was provided in ROM on all Commodore coputers except their IBM compatibles, Apple II series did as well as did many Radio Shack models and the Atari XL and XE 8-bit computers. Even the original IBM PC had BASIC in the firmware. Early 16-bits like the Atari ST had a highly modified variant of CP/M ported to the 68000 architecture upon which the GEM graphical interface resided--and on all but the earliest models it was all resident in ROM (can you imagine trying to get Vista on firmware cost-effectively?).
The example you give is even more ironic because the Coleco ADAM our family bought in 1984 had--you guessed it--a word processor preloaded in ROM (it bank-switched between the BIOS it had called "EOS" and the "SmartWriter" word processor depending on whether a bootable cassette or floppy was found in any of the drives). The idea is not new at all--it is a very OLD idea being resurrected because for end users it WAS a good idea to put the software you used the most to get you going faster, especially given that hard drives were rare on home computers and slower floppies and even slowere cassettes were the only practical alternative.
The biggest disadvantage was that firmware was not easily updatable. When software was simpler people just lived with the bugs until an updated hardware revision was out but with todays complex software (in some cases poorly written and poorly architectd at that) requires frequent updates as bugs are more numerous and more dangerous to your data (since we now have to deal with the internet). Now with flash memory technology having matured the updating problem is gone...the only thing left to contend with is cost (much more than a hard drive, plus software is so bloated).
There is another factor too--hardware has become more intelligent, as have operating systems and over time the traditional BIOS in the PC platform has become almost irrelevant beyond reverse compatibility. New hardware and current OSes use next to nothing in the BIOS anymore. So, creating applications in the "BIOS" is the way these companies try to stay relevant. It's important to note, however, that BIOSes are mostly proprietary to the point that it could be difficult to write Free software on the platform, and in juristictions with DMCA-like copyright regulations even illegal (as the DMCA is often used to restrict the ability to reverse-engineer). That's why Free software BIOS projects are important, and why Free hardware is something that must get more attention, because the parts of the BIOS that remain relevant happen to be the parts that make the wide variety of motherboards out there software-compatible with each other.
Wild turkeys can fly. Domestic turkeys are too fat.
http://www.kidzone.ws/animals/turkey.htm
(search for "unable to fly")
As someone who's had flocks of wild turkeys fly over his head, I can attest to their ability to fly first hand. I've also seen them fly away after being shot. That's why you always aim for the head; their feathers are too tough for shotgun pellets.
The good point of this is that it could show to some (non-technophile) people that 1. Windows exist, and 2. their PC can be used without Windows.
Later on, some (small) fraction of these users might consider switching to some other operating system (which could be good for Linux & opensource).
At last, I think it opens a very interesting can of worms: finally the BIOS is evolving (yes I do know about EFI for Apple, OpenFirmware for some old Suns, OpenBIOS or LinuxBIOS for some happy few motherboards).
What surprises me is that the BIOS are not evolving these days (with the exception of useless gadgets). In particular (even if Microsoft don't care yet) a better BIOS with a better loading procedure (imagine a BIOS containing the GRUB loader!) could be welcome.
AFAIK, current BIOSes are not something of importance when choosing hardware (e.g. a motherboard), except perhaps for overclocking.
Perhaps their proposal can do a better job, but it doesn't appear to be new ground.
You are talking about the MediaDirect feature. It actually uses Windows XP embeded. The first time its loaded it loads fully. Then it writes what is basically a hibernation file. So all subsequent boots load this hibernation file which brings the system to a fully running state faster than booting Windows XP Embeded, and much faster than booting all of normal Windows from scratch. (But there is not enough difference in loading speed to justify loading MediaDirect instead of hibernated Windows XP.)
The main two complaints I have heard about the system is that it does not have DivX support (This would have been near trivial for dell to add. The technical side could easily be completed in less than one programmer day.) and that it does not support Windows Media DRM files. (This would be harder to support, and to do it reasonably would require support by Microsoft.)
Stylish sheet to fix many problems in Slashdot's D3: https://gist.github.com/801524
He installed a device into his head which functions as an alarm. It allows him to have an alarm without the need for an external device.
As to why it's going off....maybe he put AM instead of PM?
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
Yes. Amiga had a 32-bit preemptive multitasking OS in ROM in the 80s.
Making laws based on opinions that stem up from false informations leads to witch hunts.
Not exactly a Windows alternative.. more akin to that little external display thing that you can do with Vista. This would be really cool for times when you just want to check a map or the cinema schedule or whatever and dont have any other method of accessing the web close at hand - though once the standard resolution for phone displays a bit better then this kind of thing will be unecessary.
which is totally what she said
A simple yet functional OS and applications on a chip! Why didn't someone think of doing this before!?
OH WAIT, THEY DID AND MICROSOFT PUSHED THEM OUT OF THEIR MARKET AND SENT THEM OUT OF BUSINESS
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Why is the headline of the story, "Bypass Windows..."?
Wouldn't this same technology allow you to bypass Linux, BSD, OS X or any other OS out there? Wouldn't it offer you same or more utility in any case?
How about this one: "Bypass Linux With Fast-Boot Technology" - Don't have time/patience/technical aptitude to learn Linux? Easy, just bypass Linux and learn Firefox and OpenOffice.
It's been my experience that most boot delays are waiting for network startup, particularly DHCP broadcast/response. If you take a snapshot of the whole OS state then unless you have a long term IP address lease or a fixed address, you could end up with a duplicate address which could snarf things up a bit. Faster DHCP registration the cure?
Do not mock my vision of impractical footwear
Don't forget RISC OS -- a 32 bit OS with very nice intuitive GUI, first version back in 1987 and still going to this day. The OS is stored on ROM chips and boots in a matter of seconds; the CPU is an ARM based chip. In fact, the current day ARM Ltd. is a spinoff from Acorn, a company based in Cambridge (UK) who designed, built, manufactured and wrote the OS and software for RISC OS machines. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC_OS/
True, but who is going to be running AIX on their home pc?
anyway, having a subset of features running without windows is likely to be a miserable failure. Most consumers probably turn on their PCs about once per day, and once it is booted, all of their applications are available for use. Why would these people then want to reboot, to get a subset of these applications (or vica versa, rebooting to open some pdf/flash file that the bios rom doesn't have a reader for, etc)?
If these people wanted to be useful, they would push companies like microsoft (or make a driver) to make a ram image of a freshly booted copy of windows xp (or whatever) upon first boot/after hardware changes, and then continue using that image after every boot.(hell, even store that on some solid state memory provided by phoenix, etc)
Sure, there may be drive consistency issues, network state/etc, but issues like that can be fixed. It would probably be a lot simpler than loading a little operating system onto a cmos chip.
I fear the Y2038 bug
Actually most of the 30-90 second boot process is interrogating the hardware from top to bottom to re-discover all the different pieces of hardware you might have in the system, on a one-by-one basis, then loading the individual sets of drivers for each. Just because you had an nVidia video card, Intel chipset, Creative Labs PCI sound card, six USB ports, and a 100Mb/s Ethernet NIC by SMC in your system when you shut it down last time, that doesn't mean those are the components in your system this time you do a cold boot - so the OS goes through the entire discovery process from top to bottom again, loading the drivers for the hardware it finds after going through the process of discovering each piece of hardware in your system.
... no, that one is used, how about picking a different one...'. If there was a way to code Windows to skip the PnP (Plug and Play) and just tell it what all you had for hardware and where in memory / IRQ / DMAland to put each piece (or just tell it that the hardware it had when it shut down was the same hardware it had the next boot) - I'm guessing that the OS would boot a LOT faster. Like order of magnitude faster.
That's why my laptop can recovery from 'stand-by' or 'hibernate' modes in almost no-time, but a cold boot still takes a veritable lifetime - approaching two minutes before the system is fully loaded and operational, and why solid state drives only shave 6-8 seconds from boot times while offering nano-second seek times.
Back in the old days you hard-coded the memory addresses, IRQs, DMA addresses, etc of the hardware in the boot files, which is why older (much slower) systems booted so fast. No parsing every IRQ and memory address in the system looking for new hardware, asking each piece of hardware 'what are you, what kind of drivers do you use, which IRQ do you want
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer