Good thing there's also a free-as-in-beer version. You can do that sort of thing with free-as-in-speech programs. You can also try to make a profit if you like.
You're *free* to do whatever you like. Isn't that great?
I thought such a thing was impossible, but I'm proud to say that I contributed my boycott to it.:P
Seriously, some classic game GBA ports that I would love to see but will never happen:
Strategy: Master of Magic (What happened to Simtex?) X-COM/UFO
Platformers: Duke Nukem Commander Keen
Combat Sims: F-19 Stealth Figther Silent Service II
I could probably name many more, but those are all games which I feel are consistent with the small screen, limited processing power and few controls of the GBA. Plus I used to love playing them!
You can use these with a PC as well. If you've got a KVM to switch between PC and Mac, now's the time to finally use a Mac keyboard instead of a PC one.:)
Alternately, check out the Fujitsu 4725 (which for some reason appears to be a distinctly Canadian thing).
I've got one, it's beautiful. Based on the IBM Model M technology, which I think Fujitsu licensed or acquired somehow. PS/2 only, which means you need a PS2/USB adapter for it to work with most Macs, but the clickyclicky is very worth it, and unlike the keyboard in the article, it's not backordered and about half the price.
(Stay the hell away from the Fujitsu 8725, it's model number suggests that it's better, but it's actually a cheap, horribly mushy piece of garbage)
Would you please cut that shit out? "He stole"? What is up with this need to fit every computer crime into our existing little niches of criminal activity?
He used priviledged information in an unethical way that gave an unfair advantage to his new employer, which should be illegal if it isn't already. But he didn't steal. When you get fired by your employer do you try to prosecute them for "aggravated assault"? Stop stretching definitions, especially to the ludicrous extent that "theft" has been stretched. Look, I'm stealing your bandwidth right now! Ha ha ha!
In high school, I remember learning that averages don't give a good representation, because extremes will skew the numbers. The median is a better representation.
First of all, it's called a "mean", not an average. It's a type of average. The median is also an average. So is the mode.
Secondly, the median is not necessarily a better representation, just different. With the median, for example, you have *no idea* whether there are any extreme outliers. 1,1,2,5000000,90000000000. Median is 2. Is that representative of that set of numbers? Not really. The mean would give you a much better idea of what range of numbers you're dealing with in that case. That's why real statistics with distribution curves and standard deviation are important.
Anyway, I'm done nitpicking. I agree that these reports are blatantly skewed. This is not really a surprise. Almost all research is funded and biased these days. Much like news media. It's a simple fact of life. The important thing is to know your source, and try to understand their motivations.
When the next "scientific study" comes along saying that P2P increases music sales, no matter how much you believe that to be true, you need to take a look at who's writing it, and why. Is this some graduate student who is probably downloading his own MP3s all the time and just trying to justify their habits to the world? Perhaps not, but it's wise to make sure before you start throwing his or her study around as if it were gospel.
Sorry if that sounded as if it was directed at you, it wasn't really. It's just some good advice (in my opinion).
I don't argue that they *can* be backup powersupplies. I'm saying that they shouldn't be, if you care about the rather expensive batteries. If you do it once, no big deal. In fact you may want to run them down from time to time just to get an idea of whether the batteries are going to need replacing soon.
On the other hand, if you're running them bone-dry more than once a month, I can nearly guarantee it'd be cheaper to get a generator. They're not designed to be run dry on a regular basis, and it will severely shorten the lifetime of the batteries.
I was on a cross-country trip from Calgary to Toronto to visit my family. I had only been in Ontario for under 24 hours when, click, all the lights go off. We're out in the boonies, everyone assumes someone has just had an accident and knocked out a transmission line. An hour later, everything is still out. Gas is getting low. We're approaching North Bay, tank almost empty, and everything is still completely out. We decide, at this point, we'd better not go any further, so we stop at a gas station to wait for the power to come back so we can get gas.
So, we end up stuck at a gas station overnight with no gas (the irony). Oh, don't worry, they had a generator, but it was "only for the diner" *cough*bullshit*cough* so people could get some food. Yes, of course they charged money. Hey look, a captive audience who can't go anywhere else! It's either eat here or starve!
That's terrible for the batteries you know. SLA batteries are notorious for poor full-discharge performance. You can get deep-cycle batteries which work better with long discharge cycles, but even these will last longer if you only discharge them as much as necessary.
If you really need maximum uptime, you should be using a generator. Large up-front cost, but it'll save you many batteries and headaches in the long run. UPSes are intended to prevent the power from being suddenly interrupted. They are not backup power supplies, even if they are frequently marketed as such.
You're a victim of definition creep. What you're actually talking about a shock absorber, which is a specfic subset, or perhaps even just a specific component, of a modern suspension system. There is nothing saying that a suspension system must be flexible, nor that it must do anything other than suspend the rider and frame in the air. A chromoly fork is a suspension system, albeit one that is poor at shock absorption (And conversely excellent at shock transmission!)
A rotating cam designed to smooth out bumps inherent to the wheel isn't fundamentally much different than a spring designed to smooth out bumps inherent to the road, except that because the bumps inherent to the wheel are calculated and predictable, a spring would be a poor solution. The road bumps, on the other hand, can't really be predicted, so it needs a more flexible (no pun intended) method of shock absorption.
Pointless little sidenote: As far as I can see, if you had a square-wheel bike with a correcting cam, and ran it over the bumpy road described in the article, the wheel would ride smoothly, and the cam would overcorrect, so you would still need a shock absorber to go over that road. It'd just be bumping in the opposite phase compared to a normal tire.;)
I'd love to go to this great utopia where everyone is free yet somehow agrees on all world conflicts, on all internal policy, has the most enlightened leader ever, and doesn't even need an army because the country is loved by everybody, world over.
Well, it sounds like Canada is almost the place for you.
Oh and btw - doesn't laptop use on planes cause problems with navigation equipment? Or is it just during take-off and landing that its problematic?
Laptop use is not problematic except in the sense that if there is a rough landing (or aborted takeoff), they don't want to get sued when your laptop smashes into the seat in front of you and breaks its LCD, or when your gadget gets thrown into your face and breaks your nose. As a result, they ask you to turn off and stow any electronic devices during takeoff/landing. Cellphones are a matter of debate, but speaking as a student pilot I find it hard to believe there's any inappropriately shielded piece of equipment on an airplane for the cellphone to interfere with.
Cool, thanks for the correction. It's been a long while since I've watched B5, although this Ask Slashdot has rekindled my desire to. (and they need to put out the rest of the DVDs, damnit!)
DS9 had some awesome battles towards the end of the series, during the Dominion War, and although they were often short by most people's standards, they were still pretty long action sequences for a Trek.
B5, obviously. You mentioned it already, but really, the battles in B5 are some of the best that I've ever seen, especially when coupled with the build-up to the battle provided by the storyline. "There is only one man who has ever survived a battle with a Minbari fleet. That man is behind me. You are in front of me. If you value your lives, you will leave." (Technically not a battle, but there's one shortly afterwards)
Battlestar Galactica had some cheesy battles that were actually pretty good for their time.
The Wing Commander movie had some good space combat in it, it's really too bad they felt the need to lobotomize the plot into some sickening Hollywood "Ooh Blair is one with the universe and has magic powers" tripe. Really not a bad movie though if you go take a walk for a minute anytime you hear the word "pilgrim".
Finally, as long as I'm talking space shows: Go buy Firefly. It has almost no space combat (seeing as the Firefly doesn't have any weapons to speak of) but it's got the whole "no sound in a vacuum" thing going for it. Besides, it's truly excellent. If you enjoy the depth and intelligence of the characters and story in B5, you'll like Firefly too.
It's pretty obvious that we're talking about tomorrow in the context of 'April 1'. And yes, there certainly are places on earth where it is currently 'April 1'. Unless you've never heard of timezones and the international dateline.
Well, I partly suggested it so I do think it's a potentially promising idea, but unless you want liquified human cargo a plane that gets accelerated to mach 5 on the ground is going to have a runway so long that you might as well call it a high-speed train.;) Not that it's a bad idea in principle, just saying that perhaps mach 5 is a bit excessive.
Blimps, though, are another great idea that I hadn't thought of. First we'd need to get over the irrational fear of the Hindenburg disaster though, which is apparently quite difficult. But they are certainly an economical means of aerial transportation. Also, they were quite luxurious and comfortable compared to today's commercial airliners; perhaps the longer, cheaper voyages would bring some passenger comfort back into the mix. Or maybe I'm just deluding myself and they'll just continue to pack us in like cattle, but I dream.;)
Planes need fuels like Kerosene and Diesel, that is, heavy hydrocarbons. Without such energy dense fuels they can't get off the ground.
That's just plain silly. First of all, they're not 'heavy' hydrocarbons. Many, if not most space launchers have used kerosene as a fuel, including the Saturn series of rockets. They use it because it's a particularly light fuel. Liquid Hydrogen + Liquid Oxygen is better, but requires a lot of cryogenic equipment and has only come into style in the past couple decades.
Planes, on the other hand, have much much much less restrictive fuel requirements because they get remarkable amounts of lift from the atmosphere, whereas a rocket has to brute-force its way up against gravity directly. Planes don't need any particular fuel at all to fly in many cases (See: gliders, hanggliders, etc) and if you want sustained flight, it's quite possible to pedal wherever you want to go (until you get tired, which'll be quickly!)
Admittedly, neither of those methods will get you anywhere fast, but the point is, that planes don't "need" this superpowered fuel any more than your car "has to have" gasoline. Well yes, it does, but only because it's so abundant at the moment that we don't have any motivation to look for something different.
There are all sorts of possibilities for building high-speed airplane without using fossil fuels. Hydrogen comes immediately to mind as nearly a drop-in replacement for the fuels in turbojet engines. It's already being used in the scramjet engine, you'll notice. But why stop there? Alternatives abound, consider a ground-based catapult launch system to get the plane up to a reasonable velocity, then just coast with some conventional prop engines until you arrive at the destination. Perhaps more research into the phenomenon that powers the high-voltage tinfoil lifters that kooks claim are anti-gravity machines will yield a new type of economical atmospheric propulsion?
Be a bit more creative. (And don't complain that these may be more expensive than current fuels: If we run out of fossil fuels, everything will be doubling in price and then some, so you'll get used to it.)
My friend has done this with his growlmurrdurr aggregator. It uses SpamBayes along with a set of "this sucks", "this is yay" buttons on displayed feeds to highlight them appropriately.
Also, I'm not certain, but I strongly suspect that Google is using some sort of Bayesian filtering as at least part of their criteria for Google News.
Now exorbitant licensing fees will force stupid websites to give up their 'www.', and, one can hope that as a result they'll fix their virtual host to work if you simply type 'sitename.com' instead of 'www.sitename.com'.
(P.S.: For the humour impaired, yes patents suck, especially this most ridiculous of patents.)
Interestingly enough, there's a front page article on the LinuxBios project.
LinuxBios, good catch. I think that may have been what I was thinking of when I typed 'openbios' into google, but both look interesting.
As for Apple, trading software lock-in for hardware lock-in is hardly a solution.
It's more like trading a screwdriver that only allows you to unscrew the screws on particular objects, for a screwdriver that only accepts a few particular brands of hex bit. They're both potentially draconian, but one's a on completely different level of draconian.
I agree though, it's hardly a solution. The point I was trying to suggest is that there isn't really any good solution right now. The biopoly of AMD/Intel, AMI/Phoenix, (not to mention certain other two-party systems *cough*) work much like a monopoly in many ways. One of those ways is that provided that both halves of the biopoly agree to include 'x' for whatever reason, the consumer has no choice and must accept 'x'.
Take the hint and unsubscribe them from the newsletter/mailing that they "opted" to receive. It is not too hard.
Uh, it is in fact 'too hard' when you never get a notification from AOL that person 'x' thinks your mail is spam, or any notification from AOL at all. Just one day your IP goes over the magic limit of complaints and you get kicked out of AOL's mail servers.
Unless you mean unsubscribing all AOL users, but if you're just going to avoid sending AOL users any mail at all, why do you care whether you get blacklisted or not?
If there are any non-DRM BIOSes out there it's just because they haven't been updated yet. Don't buy them now, or you'll have no choice but to buy them for your next computer. AMI is gone, Phoenix is gone and Award no longer exists except as a sub-brand of Phoenix. Yes, this is a scary phenomenon. Vote with dollars. Apple's OpenFirmware doesn't contain any DRM (who knows for how long), Sun also uses OpenFirmware I believe?
If you absolutely insist on sticking to PC/Windows, consider supporting the OpenBIOS project, but it's not available as a hardware BIOS, nor in any motherboards that I know of, it's an after-the-purchase flash update (plus god only knows if it works properly). And since you're trying to flash away the DRM in the BIOS, you never know, it may not be allowed in the future. After all, we have to keep "viruses" from flashing our BIOSes now don't we? So lets make sure those flashes are cryptographically signed by Award/Phoenix/AMI...
Myself, I would prefer to install an OS for free (or cheap) and install the programs I prefer afterwards. An OS means "Operating System", which should be a kernel and a set of utilities to manage your system and keep it operating. Anything more than that, anything that you DO with your computer is an 'application'. You should have a fair choice as to which 'application' you want, instead of being biased towards IE, or Windows Media, because "you've already paid for it" (in the cost of the OS.) The other brands are almost forced to compete for free, even though IE and WMP are not really "free". If the other apps could also be bundled into the OS in place of the MS versions, then they should be getting some of that money that you paid for the OS, and everyone is happy (except Microsoft)
Alternately, if Microsoft sold Windows for $20 which is a reasonable price for a bare-bones OS, then sold IE for another $10, I could choose whether I wanted IE, or Mozilla, or Opera, and everyone would be on a level playing field. Dell, if they wanted, could ship IE with their systems or Mozilla. OEMs love having the opportunity to choose their bundles. Same goes for Office suites, barring the fact that MS has so much of a stranglehold over their format now that it'd be difficult for anyone else to get into that market even with a level playing field regarding bundling.
Slashdot Mirror
Good thing there's also a free-as-in-beer version. You can do that sort of thing with free-as-in-speech programs. You can also try to make a profit if you like.
You're *free* to do whatever you like. Isn't that great?
I thought such a thing was impossible, but I'm proud to say that I contributed my boycott to it. :P
Seriously, some classic game GBA ports that I would love to see but will never happen:
Strategy:
Master of Magic (What happened to Simtex?)
X-COM/UFO
Platformers:
Duke Nukem
Commander Keen
Combat Sims:
F-19 Stealth Figther
Silent Service II
I could probably name many more, but those are all games which I feel are consistent with the small screen, limited processing power and few controls of the GBA. Plus I used to love playing them!
You can use these with a PC as well. If you've got a KVM to switch between PC and Mac, now's the time to finally use a Mac keyboard instead of a PC one. :)
Alternately, check out the Fujitsu 4725 (which for some reason appears to be a distinctly Canadian thing).
I've got one, it's beautiful. Based on the IBM Model M technology, which I think Fujitsu licensed or acquired somehow. PS/2 only, which means you need a PS2/USB adapter for it to work with most Macs, but the clickyclicky is very worth it, and unlike the keyboard in the article, it's not backordered and about half the price.
(Stay the hell away from the Fujitsu 8725, it's model number suggests that it's better, but it's actually a cheap, horribly mushy piece of garbage)
Would you please cut that shit out? "He stole"? What is up with this need to fit every computer crime into our existing little niches of criminal activity?
He used priviledged information in an unethical way that gave an unfair advantage to his new employer, which should be illegal if it isn't already. But he didn't steal. When you get fired by your employer do you try to prosecute them for "aggravated assault"? Stop stretching definitions, especially to the ludicrous extent that "theft" has been stretched. Look, I'm stealing your bandwidth right now! Ha ha ha!
*puts on his pirate hat*
In high school, I remember learning that averages don't give a good representation, because extremes will skew the numbers. The median is a better representation.
First of all, it's called a "mean", not an average. It's a type of average. The median is also an average. So is the mode.
Secondly, the median is not necessarily a better representation, just different. With the median, for example, you have *no idea* whether there are any extreme outliers. 1,1,2,5000000,90000000000. Median is 2. Is that representative of that set of numbers? Not really. The mean would give you a much better idea of what range of numbers you're dealing with in that case. That's why real statistics with distribution curves and standard deviation are important.
Anyway, I'm done nitpicking. I agree that these reports are blatantly skewed. This is not really a surprise. Almost all research is funded and biased these days. Much like news media. It's a simple fact of life. The important thing is to know your source, and try to understand their motivations.
When the next "scientific study" comes along saying that P2P increases music sales, no matter how much you believe that to be true, you need to take a look at who's writing it, and why. Is this some graduate student who is probably downloading his own MP3s all the time and just trying to justify their habits to the world? Perhaps not, but it's wise to make sure before you start throwing his or her study around as if it were gospel.
Sorry if that sounded as if it was directed at you, it wasn't really. It's just some good advice (in my opinion).
And just as fast, the contract they have with Real will say they can only link directly to Real's website/player.
At which point they dump Real entirely. Whoops! Would that be a good idea for Real? I'm thinking not.
I don't argue that they *can* be backup powersupplies. I'm saying that they shouldn't be, if you care about the rather expensive batteries. If you do it once, no big deal. In fact you may want to run them down from time to time just to get an idea of whether the batteries are going to need replacing soon.
On the other hand, if you're running them bone-dry more than once a month, I can nearly guarantee it'd be cheaper to get a generator. They're not designed to be run dry on a regular basis, and it will severely shorten the lifetime of the batteries.
I was on a cross-country trip from Calgary to Toronto to visit my family. I had only been in Ontario for under 24 hours when, click, all the lights go off. We're out in the boonies, everyone assumes someone has just had an accident and knocked out a transmission line. An hour later, everything is still out. Gas is getting low. We're approaching North Bay, tank almost empty, and everything is still completely out. We decide, at this point, we'd better not go any further, so we stop at a gas station to wait for the power to come back so we can get gas.
So, we end up stuck at a gas station overnight with no gas (the irony). Oh, don't worry, they had a generator, but it was "only for the diner" *cough*bullshit*cough* so people could get some food. Yes, of course they charged money. Hey look, a captive audience who can't go anywhere else! It's either eat here or starve!
What, bitter? Me? Nahh.
That's terrible for the batteries you know. SLA batteries are notorious for poor full-discharge performance. You can get deep-cycle batteries which work better with long discharge cycles, but even these will last longer if you only discharge them as much as necessary.
If you really need maximum uptime, you should be using a generator. Large up-front cost, but it'll save you many batteries and headaches in the long run. UPSes are intended to prevent the power from being suddenly interrupted. They are not backup power supplies, even if they are frequently marketed as such.
You're a victim of definition creep. What you're actually talking about a shock absorber, which is a specfic subset, or perhaps even just a specific component, of a modern suspension system. There is nothing saying that a suspension system must be flexible, nor that it must do anything other than suspend the rider and frame in the air. A chromoly fork is a suspension system, albeit one that is poor at shock absorption (And conversely excellent at shock transmission!)
;)
A rotating cam designed to smooth out bumps inherent to the wheel isn't fundamentally much different than a spring designed to smooth out bumps inherent to the road, except that because the bumps inherent to the wheel are calculated and predictable, a spring would be a poor solution. The road bumps, on the other hand, can't really be predicted, so it needs a more flexible (no pun intended) method of shock absorption.
Pointless little sidenote: As far as I can see, if you had a square-wheel bike with a correcting cam, and ran it over the bumpy road described in the article, the wheel would ride smoothly, and the cam would overcorrect, so you would still need a shock absorber to go over that road. It'd just be bumping in the opposite phase compared to a normal tire.
Actually, the article says the beam is 50 keV. This isn't consumer electronics (yet)
I'd love to go to this great utopia where everyone is free yet somehow agrees on all world conflicts, on all internal policy, has the most enlightened leader ever, and doesn't even need an army because the country is loved by everybody, world over.
Well, it sounds like Canada is almost the place for you.
Oh and btw - doesn't laptop use on planes cause problems with navigation equipment? Or is it just during take-off and landing that its problematic?
Laptop use is not problematic except in the sense that if there is a rough landing (or aborted takeoff), they don't want to get sued when your laptop smashes into the seat in front of you and breaks its LCD, or when your gadget gets thrown into your face and breaks your nose. As a result, they ask you to turn off and stow any electronic devices during takeoff/landing. Cellphones are a matter of debate, but speaking as a student pilot I find it hard to believe there's any inappropriately shielded piece of equipment on an airplane for the cellphone to interfere with.
... but you just know that someone's actually going to build this now.
Cool, thanks for the correction. It's been a long while since I've watched B5, although this Ask Slashdot has rekindled my desire to. (and they need to put out the rest of the DVDs, damnit!)
DS9 had some awesome battles towards the end of the series, during the Dominion War, and although they were often short by most people's standards, they were still pretty long action sequences for a Trek.
B5, obviously. You mentioned it already, but really, the battles in B5 are some of the best that I've ever seen, especially when coupled with the build-up to the battle provided by the storyline. "There is only one man who has ever survived a battle with a Minbari fleet. That man is behind me. You are in front of me. If you value your lives, you will leave." (Technically not a battle, but there's one shortly afterwards)
Battlestar Galactica had some cheesy battles that were actually pretty good for their time.
The Wing Commander movie had some good space combat in it, it's really too bad they felt the need to lobotomize the plot into some sickening Hollywood "Ooh Blair is one with the universe and has magic powers" tripe. Really not a bad movie though if you go take a walk for a minute anytime you hear the word "pilgrim".
Finally, as long as I'm talking space shows: Go buy Firefly. It has almost no space combat (seeing as the Firefly doesn't have any weapons to speak of) but it's got the whole "no sound in a vacuum" thing going for it. Besides, it's truly excellent. If you enjoy the depth and intelligence of the characters and story in B5, you'll like Firefly too.
Way to be pedantic.
It's pretty obvious that we're talking about tomorrow in the context of 'April 1'. And yes, there certainly are places on earth where it is currently 'April 1'. Unless you've never heard of timezones and the international dateline.
Well, I partly suggested it so I do think it's a potentially promising idea, but unless you want liquified human cargo a plane that gets accelerated to mach 5 on the ground is going to have a runway so long that you might as well call it a high-speed train. ;) Not that it's a bad idea in principle, just saying that perhaps mach 5 is a bit excessive.
;)
Blimps, though, are another great idea that I hadn't thought of. First we'd need to get over the irrational fear of the Hindenburg disaster though, which is apparently quite difficult. But they are certainly an economical means of aerial transportation. Also, they were quite luxurious and comfortable compared to today's commercial airliners; perhaps the longer, cheaper voyages would bring some passenger comfort back into the mix. Or maybe I'm just deluding myself and they'll just continue to pack us in like cattle, but I dream.
Planes need fuels like Kerosene and Diesel, that is, heavy hydrocarbons. Without such energy dense fuels they can't get off the ground.
That's just plain silly. First of all, they're not 'heavy' hydrocarbons. Many, if not most space launchers have used kerosene as a fuel, including the Saturn series of rockets. They use it because it's a particularly light fuel. Liquid Hydrogen + Liquid Oxygen is better, but requires a lot of cryogenic equipment and has only come into style in the past couple decades.
Planes, on the other hand, have much much much less restrictive fuel requirements because they get remarkable amounts of lift from the atmosphere, whereas a rocket has to brute-force its way up against gravity directly. Planes don't need any particular fuel at all to fly in many cases (See: gliders, hanggliders, etc) and if you want sustained flight, it's quite possible to pedal wherever you want to go (until you get tired, which'll be quickly!)
Admittedly, neither of those methods will get you anywhere fast, but the point is, that planes don't "need" this superpowered fuel any more than your car "has to have" gasoline. Well yes, it does, but only because it's so abundant at the moment that we don't have any motivation to look for something different.
There are all sorts of possibilities for building high-speed airplane without using fossil fuels. Hydrogen comes immediately to mind as nearly a drop-in replacement for the fuels in turbojet engines. It's already being used in the scramjet engine, you'll notice. But why stop there? Alternatives abound, consider a ground-based catapult launch system to get the plane up to a reasonable velocity, then just coast with some conventional prop engines until you arrive at the destination. Perhaps more research into the phenomenon that powers the high-voltage tinfoil lifters that kooks claim are anti-gravity machines will yield a new type of economical atmospheric propulsion?
Be a bit more creative. (And don't complain that these may be more expensive than current fuels: If we run out of fossil fuels, everything will be doubling in price and then some, so you'll get used to it.)
My friend has done this with his growlmurrdurr aggregator. It uses SpamBayes along with a set of "this sucks", "this is yay" buttons on displayed feeds to highlight them appropriately.
Also, I'm not certain, but I strongly suspect that Google is using some sort of Bayesian filtering as at least part of their criteria for Google News.
Now exorbitant licensing fees will force stupid websites to give up their 'www.', and, one can hope that as a result they'll fix their virtual host to work if you simply type 'sitename.com' instead of 'www.sitename.com'.
(P.S.: For the humour impaired, yes patents suck, especially this most ridiculous of patents.)
Interestingly enough, there's a front page article on the LinuxBios project.
LinuxBios, good catch. I think that may have been what I was thinking of when I typed 'openbios' into google, but both look interesting.
As for Apple, trading software lock-in for hardware lock-in is hardly a solution.
It's more like trading a screwdriver that only allows you to unscrew the screws on particular objects, for a screwdriver that only accepts a few particular brands of hex bit. They're both potentially draconian, but one's a on completely different level of draconian.
I agree though, it's hardly a solution. The point I was trying to suggest is that there isn't really any good solution right now. The biopoly of AMD/Intel, AMI/Phoenix, (not to mention certain other two-party systems *cough*) work much like a monopoly in many ways. One of those ways is that provided that both halves of the biopoly agree to include 'x' for whatever reason, the consumer has no choice and must accept 'x'.
Take the hint and unsubscribe them from the newsletter/mailing that they "opted" to receive. It is not too hard.
Uh, it is in fact 'too hard' when you never get a notification from AOL that person 'x' thinks your mail is spam, or any notification from AOL at all. Just one day your IP goes over the magic limit of complaints and you get kicked out of AOL's mail servers.
Unless you mean unsubscribing all AOL users, but if you're just going to avoid sending AOL users any mail at all, why do you care whether you get blacklisted or not?
If there are any non-DRM BIOSes out there it's just because they haven't been updated yet. Don't buy them now, or you'll have no choice but to buy them for your next computer. AMI is gone, Phoenix is gone and Award no longer exists except as a sub-brand of Phoenix. Yes, this is a scary phenomenon. Vote with dollars. Apple's OpenFirmware doesn't contain any DRM (who knows for how long), Sun also uses OpenFirmware I believe?
If you absolutely insist on sticking to PC/Windows, consider supporting the OpenBIOS project, but it's not available as a hardware BIOS, nor in any motherboards that I know of, it's an after-the-purchase flash update (plus god only knows if it works properly). And since you're trying to flash away the DRM in the BIOS, you never know, it may not be allowed in the future. After all, we have to keep "viruses" from flashing our BIOSes now don't we? So lets make sure those flashes are cryptographically signed by Award/Phoenix/AMI...
Myself, I would prefer to install an OS for free (or cheap) and install the programs I prefer afterwards. An OS means "Operating System", which should be a kernel and a set of utilities to manage your system and keep it operating. Anything more than that, anything that you DO with your computer is an 'application'. You should have a fair choice as to which 'application' you want, instead of being biased towards IE, or Windows Media, because "you've already paid for it" (in the cost of the OS.) The other brands are almost forced to compete for free, even though IE and WMP are not really "free". If the other apps could also be bundled into the OS in place of the MS versions, then they should be getting some of that money that you paid for the OS, and everyone is happy (except Microsoft)
Alternately, if Microsoft sold Windows for $20 which is a reasonable price for a bare-bones OS, then sold IE for another $10, I could choose whether I wanted IE, or Mozilla, or Opera, and everyone would be on a level playing field. Dell, if they wanted, could ship IE with their systems or Mozilla. OEMs love having the opportunity to choose their bundles. Same goes for Office suites, barring the fact that MS has so much of a stranglehold over their format now that it'd be difficult for anyone else to get into that market even with a level playing field regarding bundling.