There is only one "variant" of Linux. All distributions have the same software packaged differently. You made the same mistake on all distributions because you didn't bother find out what did you do wrong in the first place. In the unlikely scenario that you actually did anything at all and not just made things up.
This sounds like the typical death of a graphics card.
This sounds like the typical fake complaint made my Microsoft astroturfer. They google for "ubuntu" and "bug", end up at some ubuntuforums post, and pretend they have the problem mentioned there. It does not matter if the problem was reported five years ago and ended up being a dead graphics card, they post that shit because it contains valid-looking references to plausible combination of software.
If you're going to redefine communism to leave out the ones you don't like, you're on the way to Newspeak yourself.
Communism was defined by Marx, and I use his definition. Stalin was a Communist (though a rather crappy one), Pol Pot was not a Communist at all.
Orwell wasn't an idiot. He was writing about totalitarianism, not just communism.
"Totalitarianism" does not exist. It's a label people from one society give to another one because they can not believe, that other society can exist without someone constantly threatening to kill people if they will not obey that other society's rules. In reality, such a situation is impossible -- if anyone tried to do that, society would be completely dysfunctional, and people in power would not be able to keep the resources that support their power, even if no actual opposition ever formed. In particular, it shows Americans' hubris -- they can not believe anyone, anywhere may want anything other than American-style Capitalism.
This is also why Orwell's portrayal of society is completely irrelevant to reality, and only has value as an illustration to anti-Communist propaganda. It's not s thought experiment, it's just fantasy with some illustrative value.
He probably felt sentimental about "real" communism, as you seem to. But he had seen where it goes in practice. Communism isn't the only route to totalitarianism. Nazi Germany,
Nazi Germany had a government that was both Fascist and Nationalist (in the original, ethnocentric/racist meaning of Nationalist). While thoroughly disgusting, Nazi did not all that much intrude in the lives of ordinary Germans as long as those Germans weren't of supposedly inferior origin. If anything, that's less "totalitarian" than Stalinism, when government was suspicious of everyone.
Czarist Russia, both did pretty well in that regard.
Czarist Russia was a run-off-the-mill Capitalist country with widespread poverty and remnants of Feudalism, however there was nothing unusually intrusive about oppression practiced there. Lenin himself claimed that Russia was closer to a revolution because of its position as "the weakest link in the chain of Capitalism", not because Czarist government had any kind of unique evilness that had to be fought specifically there.
East Germany seemed to switch over from one form of totalitarianism to another without missing a beat.
East Germany, along with Romania and other countries, managed to out-Stalin the Stalin (or at least kept Stalinist system long past the time USSR abandoned it). This has nothing to do with Nazi and everything with government oppression being actually a very popular idea among countries' rulers.
Actually yes. Seems we won't agree on much. So let's just call it a day and leave it. I will anyway.
I don't care if you agree with me or not. I have demonstrated that your position is baseless, and you are full of shit.
Only Mao of them was actually Communist -- the rest at most paid lip service to some Communist ideas.
Its hard to name a communist leader in power for a decade or more, who wasn't a paranoid tyrant who sent millions to labor camps, or just had them killed. Only after the leader is dead, the system has collapsed economically, do his successors dare to change his policies.
This is completely baseless, and I have spent a significant amount of my time here debunking "USSR was all-Stalin for all its history" and "USSR collapsed economically" myths.
Of course they were.But again, "1984" doesn't ONLY apply to communism.
No, 1984 is specifically about Communists because it was specifically written about Communists.
This article shows that it is still invoked, correctly, to point out the implications of things in our own society.
Actually, no. While some things apply legitimately, the idea of being watched by a TV has nothing objectively frightening about it, not any more than having an electricity meter or phone billing system that keeps track of call times and destinations. People would fear it even if TV used the camera to adjust contrast, brightness and white balance to match the surrounding.
Actually it is your responsibility to provide something more than bold claims when it comes to supposed security vulnerabilities.
I can only find one claim from Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> that "lxc is not supposed to be secure (it provides a chroot with usage limits, but no isolation)", what is incorrect despite being unchallenged in that particular thread.
I don't have the blog entry handy, but I for sure tested it myself
While those mechanisms may sound complex, may happen to be buggy, and are surrounded by all kinds of disclaimers, same applies in spades to virtualization implementation and virtual environment management tools. Just because VMWare is run by overconfident assholes who refuse to acknowledge impact of their products' bugs, does not mean that virtualization is not supposed be taken with the same expectations.
So far, it looks like a trivial combination of well-known mechanisms present in Linux kernel, provides a securely isolated environment within LXC right now, despite all the claims that LXC is "doing it wrong" by not bundling a namespace mechanisms with it, or various trash-talk from fans of virtualization and other host compartmentalization methods.
It would be a valid criticism toward OpenStacks, distributions and other LXC users if those people were neglecting to provide secure configuration and documentation on it as it applies to the security models and policies of their application. But this is not what you claimed, you claimed that the whole mechanism is insecure and therefore unusable, and you have nothing to back your statements but dismissive remarks of unrelated people and exploits for blatantly insecure configurations that happen to use LXC.
So back to your own irresponsible behavior:
If LXC implementation is fundamentally insecure as you claim, it's supposed to be treated as broken, and it should not be available in any "stable" version of anything. If that was the case, either:
1. There would have to be an easily accessible announcement (at very least, a CVE entry). or 2. Security practices of Linux kernel developers, OpenStack developers and all distributions are unsafe.
Referring to some mythical mailing list messages about other products and features without such reference amounts to FUD-mongering on par with our Microsoft-sponsored friends. This is completely unrelated to your own lack of research on the subject -- ignorance and laziness by themselves are forgivable, spewing vague ignorant bullshit is not.
Yeah, right. Thinking Stalinism was evil is the same as being a bigoted racist.
Stalin is one politician, harshly denounced by his successors. While he achieved iconic status, he is no more relevant to Communism than your local friendly bicycle thief to the rest of Black people.
Because most communist states were actually so nice and benevolent.
Actually, yes. Even among USSR leaders, Lenin (and most of his government) and Khruschev were definitely in the "benevolent" category, Brezhnev was more incompetent than evil, Andropov mostly deserves criticism for his actions outside USSR, and Gorbachev's worst action of his whole political career was causing dissolution of USSR (out of incompetence and poor understanding of Communist doctrine). Communist leaders on the local level certainly had greater moral standards than any Governor or Mayor in US -- at their time, or now. Masherov probably was the only leader in the whole history of Belarus that was remembered fondly by almost everyone, including political opponents of Communists.
Americans' ignorance isn't the fault of Orwell. If he had wanted to pillory communism specifically, he would have done so. He fought against the fascists in Spain. Big Brother could have been a Fascist as easily as a Communist. The labels are irrelevant once they get into power.
Orwell's portrayal of oppressive society was intended to be based on Stalinist USSR and not anything else, it emphasized and greatly exaggerrated obsessive intrusion of political machinery and propaganda into the lives of otherwise politically inactive people, a specific attribute of Stalinism. For Fascism that would be government colluding with business power structures around common self-serving, usually nationalist, ideology, with brutal oppression of politically active opponents and open, continuous hostility toward anyone perceived as an obstacle to the aforementioned power structure -- attributes not portrayed by Orwell. There is an overlap (emphasis on ideology, loud propaganda, charismatic leaders, excessive violence) and superficial similarity, but the differences are both fundamental and recognizable in all attempts of exaggerated portrayal. Stalin was dead in five years and denounced in eight, but Orwell's works were kept unchallenged in European and American cultures, and were widely promoted for anti-Communist propaganda value.
It wasn't unmotivated "fear". It was based on what Stalin was doing when Orwell wrote it.
It was not "unmotivated", it was "misdirected". In the same way how fear of black people is misdirected, even though there are plenty of violent criminals among black people.
In any case, the word "communist" isn't in the book. It was just "The Party'. Orwell had recognised that dictatorships end up the same, whatever the philosophy they start with.
Just like there is also not a single mentioning of the word "mafia" in The Godfather. Not only it's absolutely definitely was intended to refer to the society under Communist, or specifically Stalin rule, most Americans' idea of USSR is actually closer to Orwell's fiction than to reality.
In general, I think that Orwell did the mankind a great disservice when his own fear of Communists made his work focused on oppressive societies with Communist attributes. It created an impression that Communists are the only ones who oppress and brainwash people, and allowed Capitalist societies to safely develop far more powerful propaganda machines than Communists could ever think of, all the while proclaiming that they are paragons of free thought and action.
However this time, I have to thank him. He instilled in all of you a great instinctive fear of cameras in everything that looks like a TV. And this time, by pure coincidence, it is justified.
i tend to stick with HTC as they've never given me any problems so when one dies i get another HTC so if you get me liking your brand I'll tend to stick with it.
Nokia, hairyfeet. You are supposed to push Nokia now.
BIOS software is just a blob which implements the BIOS interface standard. UEFI implements a completely different interface standard. Ergo, it is not BIOS.
No. BIOS implement things, most of those with no interface whatsoever. "BIOS interface" is a paper-thin layer on some of its functionality. UEFI is just more functionality and more interface, so it's just implemented as a part of BIOS. There is no "UEFI implementation" that you can burn into a flash chip, stick it on a modern x86-based motherboard, and see it boot. There may be one used by Apple because Apple isn't afraid of re-doing things from scratch (and I never had access to any of their sources, so I honestly don't know), but all modern "PC" desktop and server computers have BIOS, and only BIOS, licensed from one of the few BIOS vendors.
But I can see that this is a complete waste of time. You'll never admit you're wrong, you'll just keep saying you used to write BIOS software and how that automatically means you're right on any topic regarding it (i.e. you're arrogant and egotistical).
Oh, I didn't "used to" work on it, I am still maintaining that particular piece of crap. I didn't write most of it, but I had to adapt it for hardware, because original developers sell half-baked source trees that every hardware manufacturer is supposed to edit (and fix whatever bugs jump out in the process if those bugs make that particular hardware unusable). So yes, unfortunately I had to dig through then-current in 2008 version of that crap, deeper than any sane person would ever want. I didn't use UEFI, and opted for storing a fixed custom bootloader in a separate section of the same flash (I used GRUB legacy stage 2) because UEFI offered no benefit whatsoever. If I chosen UEFI, I would probably be able to stuff GRUB2 in it, getting exactly the same functionality from more code and more bugs.
Also, I do note you refer to remote/console interface. Presuming that you're referring to KVMoIP/iLO, that isn't implemented in BIOS OR UEFI. It's a separate chipset or separate PCI card (depending on implementation).
Oh no, I am not talking about that shit -- having a separate piece of hardware imitating key presses on IBM AT keyboard and screen-scraping CGA text buffer because some moron has to keep those things as primary configuration interfaces on a server, 20 years after those interfaces themselves became obsolete. I am talking about BIOS serial (and usb/network/... variants) console redirection, a piece of code that I had to rewrite heavily, because as initially developed it was completely unsuitable for development of embedded systems. In the implementation I had to provide, it had to be usable for diagnostics, so it had to activate before BIOS initialized CPU and RAM (but after it initialized SIO chip for the first time), and certainly before PCI initialization. As devices initialize, console support had to be passed between multiple mechanisms, so it would not break BIOS' internal handling of interrupts, implementation of devices, common console output procedures, screen-scraping for setup program, flushing buffers before booting the OS, etc. Finally, GRUB has to take it over (in regular or screen-scraping mode) and OS boots, using the same device as its boot console (this time, without any BIOS involvement).
As one would expect, existing implementation had this (and the only available on an embedded system) console completely dark, mute and deaf until complete initialization of BIOS' internal representation of serial devices and PCI[e], so development was extremely difficult, and any resemblance of testing was completely impossible until that was changed. Some really fun bugs came out once I was able to watch early initialization and POST.
I have to apologize to anyone reading this for not being able to disclose any details, as NDA keeps me from doing that. I have to limit myself to pointing out public information on the subject.
Which is completely irrelevant. I work on Patient Administration Systems for a living, but be damned if I can perform heart surgery.
We are talking about BIOS. That I had to debug and write pieces of.
Quit being disingenuous. You and I both know the BIOS or UEFI is implemented as firmware running on an EEPROM chip located on the mainboard.
First of all, it's flash, not EEPROM, though the difference is relatively minor.
Second, you seem to conflate BIOS software with its interface exposed through interrupt handlers and data structures. Interface provided by BIOS is a tiny part of its operation, and that interface, at least its original part before PnP and ACPI were stuffed into it, is no worse than one provided with UEFI. The true horror of BIOS design is in its internals, its initialization procedure (that is still called POST), its configuration management (configuration stored in CMOS RAM that is still present in all modern chipsets and in ESCD area that is still present in BIOS flash), and its handling of devices/OS boot. Those things are severely mis-designed, have no usable software interface, implement weird standards wherever they provide interface (including aforementioned ACPI), and full of idiotic bugs.
UEFI only "solves" the problem of boot device and some additional hardware handling, however it does not change the fact that it's the same blob of BIOS code that implements it. The rest is still there. POST (broken initialization) is there, ACPI (broken resource and power management) is still there, remote/console interface (completely broken and unreliable) is still there, all the part of the BIOS that everyone hates so much, are still in place and can not be removed without losing hardware support.
It then goes on to talk about how Phoenix built a UEFI-BIOS hybrid chip that contains both a UEFI firmware image and a BIOS firmware image so that hardware and software that don't support UEFI will still actually work.
No, they didn't mention any kind of "BIOS image" or "UEFI image". They talk about BIOS product that implements UEFI and keeps its BIOS interface and all its BIOS internals. Because they can't ever remove that crap, it's the core of their product and their business.
Here is your problem. Unless you are Microsoft or FSF, no one wants your tools if there is an alternative, and people would only grudgingly use them if it's the only way to make some hardware work. That includes CPU manufacturers themselves.
Said Kalriath to a person who actually had a displeasure working on BIOS sources.
The BIOS is the old firmware interface burned into the ROM, not the chip itself
What "chip"? Initially there is no CPU-visible ROM other than BIOS flash, attached to LPC (pseudo-ISA) bus/Intel FWH interface or some equivalent. Before the code in it runs, CPU can't even access RAM. Hell, it can't even run properly because it didn't get Intel microcode updates buried inside the BIOS image.
The UEFI is also a firmware interface burned into the ROM, not the chip itself. UEFI software can pretend to be BIOS software, but it is not BIOS software.
And what, do you think, does hardware initialization on boot, using the code that was piled up over 25 years? What implements idiotic standards such as ACPI? What installs non-removable SMI handlers to mess with your ECC RAM and break your realtime OS? BIOS, that's what! UEFI implementation is a microscopic addition to a festering pile of shit that is PC BIOS. Go, look how they are proud of themselves: http://www.phoenix.com/docs/BridgingBIOStoUEFI_July2007.pdf They taken their BIOS and "made it compatible" by bolting Intel code on top of it. That's the only implementation you will find on anything except, maybe, Apple.
I don't have experience running anything important on Windows. Fortunately I see enough of examples of this around, without having to make all mistakes by myself.
UEFI is a standard implemented by BIOS. UEFI implementation is BIOS. There are no "emulators", it's the same old BIOS with UEFI functionality bolted on.
I commend you for the use of "M$" despite Microsoft trolls deriding it.
Microsoft has nothing of any importance other than monopoly power they inherited from IBM and money they got through abuse of that monopoly power. Technologically they are just as bankrupt as they are morally.
The only important thing about OpenStack is that it supports implementation of managed, dynamically allocated and partitioned clusters (what "cloud" really is) with LXC, a non-virtualization host partitioning technology.
Slashdot Mirror
various linux variants
There is only one "variant" of Linux. All distributions have the same software packaged differently. You made the same mistake on all distributions because you didn't bother find out what did you do wrong in the first place. In the unlikely scenario that you actually did anything at all and not just made things up.
This sounds like the typical death of a graphics card.
This sounds like the typical fake complaint made my Microsoft astroturfer. They google for "ubuntu" and "bug", end up at some ubuntuforums post, and pretend they have the problem mentioned there. It does not matter if the problem was reported five years ago and ended up being a dead graphics card, they post that shit because it contains valid-looking references to plausible combination of software.
If you're going to redefine communism to leave out the ones you don't like, you're on the way to Newspeak yourself.
Communism was defined by Marx, and I use his definition. Stalin was a Communist (though a rather crappy one), Pol Pot was not a Communist at all.
Orwell wasn't an idiot. He was writing about totalitarianism, not just communism.
"Totalitarianism" does not exist. It's a label people from one society give to another one because they can not believe, that other society can exist without someone constantly threatening to kill people if they will not obey that other society's rules. In reality, such a situation is impossible -- if anyone tried to do that, society would be completely dysfunctional, and people in power would not be able to keep the resources that support their power, even if no actual opposition ever formed. In particular, it shows Americans' hubris -- they can not believe anyone, anywhere may want anything other than American-style Capitalism.
This is also why Orwell's portrayal of society is completely irrelevant to reality, and only has value as an illustration to anti-Communist propaganda. It's not s thought experiment, it's just fantasy with some illustrative value.
He probably felt sentimental about "real" communism, as you seem to. But he had seen where it goes in practice. Communism isn't the only route to totalitarianism. Nazi Germany,
Nazi Germany had a government that was both Fascist and Nationalist (in the original, ethnocentric/racist meaning of Nationalist). While thoroughly disgusting, Nazi did not all that much intrude in the lives of ordinary Germans as long as those Germans weren't of supposedly inferior origin. If anything, that's less "totalitarian" than Stalinism, when government was suspicious of everyone.
Czarist Russia, both did pretty well in that regard.
Czarist Russia was a run-off-the-mill Capitalist country with widespread poverty and remnants of Feudalism, however there was nothing unusually intrusive about oppression practiced there. Lenin himself claimed that Russia was closer to a revolution because of its position as "the weakest link in the chain of Capitalism", not because Czarist government had any kind of unique evilness that had to be fought specifically there.
East Germany seemed to switch over from one form of totalitarianism to another without missing a beat.
East Germany, along with Romania and other countries, managed to out-Stalin the Stalin (or at least kept Stalinist system long past the time USSR abandoned it). This has nothing to do with Nazi and everything with government oppression being actually a very popular idea among countries' rulers.
Actually yes. Seems we won't agree on much. So let's just call it a day and leave it. I will anyway.
I don't care if you agree with me or not. I have demonstrated that your position is baseless, and you are full of shit.
So is crack dealer because gangster V is paid more than senior manager (no taxes).
The only area where we see a glut of qualified applicants is in QA.
Actually no, QA applicants, and your QA department are incompetent, too. You just don't know how to evaluate their competence.
Let's face it...if you didn't have to work...were independently rich, you'd not be sweating at the factory so to speak.
I would -- I would be bored to death if I had nothing to do, and my job is the same as my hobby.
Also please kill all your friends, then yourself.
Mao. Kim Il Sung. Pol Pot.
Only Mao of them was actually Communist -- the rest at most paid lip service to some Communist ideas.
Its hard to name a communist leader in power for a decade or more, who wasn't a paranoid tyrant who sent millions to labor camps, or just had them killed. Only after the leader is dead, the system has collapsed economically, do his successors dare to change his policies.
This is completely baseless, and I have spent a significant amount of my time here debunking "USSR was all-Stalin for all its history" and "USSR collapsed economically" myths.
Of course they were.But again, "1984" doesn't ONLY apply to communism.
No, 1984 is specifically about Communists because it was specifically written about Communists.
This article shows that it is still invoked, correctly, to point out the implications of things in our own society.
Actually, no. While some things apply legitimately, the idea of being watched by a TV has nothing objectively frightening about it, not any more than having an electricity meter or phone billing system that keeps track of call times and destinations. People would fear it even if TV used the camera to adjust contrast, brightness and white balance to match the surrounding.
I'm not going to do the homework for you
Actually it is your responsibility to provide something more than bold claims when it comes to supposed security vulnerabilities.
I can only find one claim from Adam Borowski <kilobyte@angband.pl> that "lxc is not supposed to be secure (it provides a chroot with usage limits, but no isolation)", what is incorrect despite being unchallenged in that particular thread.
I don't have the blog entry handy, but I for sure tested it myself
"The blog entry" was extensively discussed in this thread: http://www.mail-archive.com/lxc-users@lists.sourceforge.net/msg02368.html , and it was demonstrated that it's possible to use existing and widely used mechanisms in Linux kernel to prevent attacks of this kind, most relevant messages being http://www.mail-archive.com/lxc-users@lists.sourceforge.net/msg02382.html and http://www.mail-archive.com/lxc-users@lists.sourceforge.net/msg02375.html .
The link to the python script mentioned, no longer works due to what looks like switch to Git, so it's now http://git.coredumb.net/cgit.cgi/coredumb/tree/scripts/python/smack_label.py .
While those mechanisms may sound complex, may happen to be buggy, and are surrounded by all kinds of disclaimers, same applies in spades to virtualization implementation and virtual environment management tools. Just because VMWare is run by overconfident assholes who refuse to acknowledge impact of their products' bugs, does not mean that virtualization is not supposed be taken with the same expectations.
So far, it looks like a trivial combination of well-known mechanisms present in Linux kernel, provides a securely isolated environment within LXC right now, despite all the claims that LXC is "doing it wrong" by not bundling a namespace mechanisms with it, or various trash-talk from fans of virtualization and other host compartmentalization methods.
It would be a valid criticism toward OpenStacks, distributions and other LXC users if those people were neglecting to provide secure configuration and documentation on it as it applies to the security models and policies of their application. But this is not what you claimed, you claimed that the whole mechanism is insecure and therefore unusable, and you have nothing to back your statements but dismissive remarks of unrelated people and exploits for blatantly insecure configurations that happen to use LXC.
So back to your own irresponsible behavior:
If LXC implementation is fundamentally insecure as you claim, it's supposed to be treated as broken, and it should not be available in any "stable" version of anything. If that was the case, either:
1. There would have to be an easily accessible announcement (at very least, a CVE entry).
or
2. Security practices of Linux kernel developers, OpenStack developers and all distributions are unsafe.
Referring to some mythical mailing list messages about other products and features without such reference amounts to FUD-mongering on par with our Microsoft-sponsored friends. This is completely unrelated to your own lack of research on the subject -- ignorance and laziness by themselves are forgivable, spewing vague ignorant bullshit is not.
Yeah, right. Thinking Stalinism was evil is the same as being a bigoted racist.
Stalin is one politician, harshly denounced by his successors. While he achieved iconic status, he is no more relevant to Communism than your local friendly bicycle thief to the rest of Black people.
Because most communist states were actually so nice and benevolent.
Actually, yes. Even among USSR leaders, Lenin (and most of his government) and Khruschev were definitely in the "benevolent" category, Brezhnev was more incompetent than evil, Andropov mostly deserves criticism for his actions outside USSR, and Gorbachev's worst action of his whole political career was causing dissolution of USSR (out of incompetence and poor understanding of Communist doctrine). Communist leaders on the local level certainly had greater moral standards than any Governor or Mayor in US -- at their time, or now. Masherov probably was the only leader in the whole history of Belarus that was remembered fondly by almost everyone, including political opponents of Communists.
Americans' ignorance isn't the fault of Orwell. If he had wanted to pillory communism specifically, he would have done so. He fought against the fascists in Spain. Big Brother could have been a Fascist as easily as a Communist. The labels are irrelevant once they get into power.
Orwell's portrayal of oppressive society was intended to be based on Stalinist USSR and not anything else, it emphasized and greatly exaggerrated obsessive intrusion of political machinery and propaganda into the lives of otherwise politically inactive people, a specific attribute of Stalinism. For Fascism that would be government colluding with business power structures around common self-serving, usually nationalist, ideology, with brutal oppression of politically active opponents and open, continuous hostility toward anyone perceived as an obstacle to the aforementioned power structure -- attributes not portrayed by Orwell. There is an overlap (emphasis on ideology, loud propaganda, charismatic leaders, excessive violence) and superficial similarity, but the differences are both fundamental and recognizable in all attempts of exaggerated portrayal. Stalin was dead in five years and denounced in eight, but Orwell's works were kept unchallenged in European and American cultures, and were widely promoted for anti-Communist propaganda value.
It wasn't unmotivated "fear". It was based on what Stalin was doing when Orwell wrote it.
It was not "unmotivated", it was "misdirected". In the same way how fear of black people is misdirected, even though there are plenty of violent criminals among black people.
In any case, the word "communist" isn't in the book. It was just "The Party'. Orwell had recognised that dictatorships end up the same, whatever the philosophy they start with.
Just like there is also not a single mentioning of the word "mafia" in The Godfather.
Not only it's absolutely definitely was intended to refer to the society under Communist, or specifically Stalin rule, most Americans' idea of USSR is actually closer to Orwell's fiction than to reality.
s/instinctive/almost instinctive/
In general, I think that Orwell did the mankind a great disservice when his own fear of Communists made his work focused on oppressive societies with Communist attributes. It created an impression that Communists are the only ones who oppress and brainwash people, and allowed Capitalist societies to safely develop far more powerful propaganda machines than Communists could ever think of, all the while proclaiming that they are paragons of free thought and action.
However this time, I have to thank him. He instilled in all of you a great instinctive fear of cameras in everything that looks like a TV. And this time, by pure coincidence, it is justified.
i tend to stick with HTC as they've never given me any problems so when one dies i get another HTC so if you get me liking your brand I'll tend to stick with it.
Nokia, hairyfeet. You are supposed to push Nokia now.
The only issue is that LXC is currently borken in the kernel, because you can easily escape from the chroot that it provides.
[citation needed]
BIOS software is just a blob which implements the BIOS interface standard. UEFI implements a completely different interface standard. Ergo, it is not BIOS.
No. BIOS implement things, most of those with no interface whatsoever. "BIOS interface" is a paper-thin layer on some of its functionality. UEFI is just more functionality and more interface, so it's just implemented as a part of BIOS. There is no "UEFI implementation" that you can burn into a flash chip, stick it on a modern x86-based motherboard, and see it boot. There may be one used by Apple because Apple isn't afraid of re-doing things from scratch (and I never had access to any of their sources, so I honestly don't know), but all modern "PC" desktop and server computers have BIOS, and only BIOS, licensed from one of the few BIOS vendors.
But I can see that this is a complete waste of time. You'll never admit you're wrong, you'll just keep saying you used to write BIOS software and how that automatically means you're right on any topic regarding it (i.e. you're arrogant and egotistical).
Oh, I didn't "used to" work on it, I am still maintaining that particular piece of crap. I didn't write most of it, but I had to adapt it for hardware, because original developers sell half-baked source trees that every hardware manufacturer is supposed to edit (and fix whatever bugs jump out in the process if those bugs make that particular hardware unusable). So yes, unfortunately I had to dig through then-current in 2008 version of that crap, deeper than any sane person would ever want. I didn't use UEFI, and opted for storing a fixed custom bootloader in a separate section of the same flash (I used GRUB legacy stage 2) because UEFI offered no benefit whatsoever. If I chosen UEFI, I would probably be able to stuff GRUB2 in it, getting exactly the same functionality from more code and more bugs.
Also, I do note you refer to remote/console interface. Presuming that you're referring to KVMoIP/iLO, that isn't implemented in BIOS OR UEFI. It's a separate chipset or separate PCI card (depending on implementation).
Oh no, I am not talking about that shit -- having a separate piece of hardware imitating key presses on IBM AT keyboard and screen-scraping CGA text buffer because some moron has to keep those things as primary configuration interfaces on a server, 20 years after those interfaces themselves became obsolete. I am talking about BIOS serial (and usb/network/... variants) console redirection, a piece of code that I had to rewrite heavily, because as initially developed it was completely unsuitable for development of embedded systems. In the implementation I had to provide, it had to be usable for diagnostics, so it had to activate before BIOS initialized CPU and RAM (but after it initialized SIO chip for the first time), and certainly before PCI initialization. As devices initialize, console support had to be passed between multiple mechanisms, so it would not break BIOS' internal handling of interrupts, implementation of devices, common console output procedures, screen-scraping for setup program, flushing buffers before booting the OS, etc. Finally, GRUB has to take it over (in regular or screen-scraping mode) and OS boots, using the same device as its boot console (this time, without any BIOS involvement).
As one would expect, existing implementation had this (and the only available on an embedded system) console completely dark, mute and deaf until complete initialization of BIOS' internal representation of serial devices and PCI[e], so development was extremely difficult, and any resemblance of testing was completely impossible until that was changed. Some really fun bugs came out once I was able to watch early initialization and POST.
I have to apologize to anyone reading this for not being able to disclose any details, as NDA keeps me from doing that. I have to limit myself to pointing out public information on the subject.
Which is completely irrelevant. I work on Patient Administration Systems for a living, but be damned if I can perform heart surgery.
We are talking about BIOS. That I had to debug and write pieces of.
Quit being disingenuous. You and I both know the BIOS or UEFI is implemented as firmware running on an EEPROM chip located on the mainboard.
First of all, it's flash, not EEPROM, though the difference is relatively minor.
Second, you seem to conflate BIOS software with its interface exposed through interrupt handlers and data structures. Interface provided by BIOS is a tiny part of its operation, and that interface, at least its original part before PnP and ACPI were stuffed into it, is no worse than one provided with UEFI. The true horror of BIOS design is in its internals, its initialization procedure (that is still called POST), its configuration management (configuration stored in CMOS RAM that is still present in all modern chipsets and in ESCD area that is still present in BIOS flash), and its handling of devices/OS boot. Those things are severely mis-designed, have no usable software interface, implement weird standards wherever they provide interface (including aforementioned ACPI), and full of idiotic bugs.
UEFI only "solves" the problem of boot device and some additional hardware handling, however it does not change the fact that it's the same blob of BIOS code that implements it. The rest is still there. POST (broken initialization) is there, ACPI (broken resource and power management) is still there, remote/console interface (completely broken and unreliable) is still there, all the part of the BIOS that everyone hates so much, are still in place and can not be removed without losing hardware support.
It then goes on to talk about how Phoenix built a UEFI-BIOS hybrid chip that contains both a UEFI firmware image and a BIOS firmware image so that hardware and software that don't support UEFI will still actually work.
No, they didn't mention any kind of "BIOS image" or "UEFI image". They talk about BIOS product that implements UEFI and keeps its BIOS interface and all its BIOS internals. Because they can't ever remove that crap, it's the core of their product and their business.
Our company makes development tools
Here is your problem. Unless you are Microsoft or FSF, no one wants your tools if there is an alternative, and people would only grudgingly use them if it's the only way to make some hardware work. That includes CPU manufacturers themselves.
I repeat -- dedicated hardware switch accessible by the user. If the intention is to provide security, no other solution is acceptable.
No, that is incorrect.
Said Kalriath to a person who actually had a displeasure working on BIOS sources.
The BIOS is the old firmware interface burned into the ROM, not the chip itself
What "chip"? Initially there is no CPU-visible ROM other than BIOS flash, attached to LPC (pseudo-ISA) bus/Intel FWH interface or some equivalent. Before the code in it runs, CPU can't even access RAM. Hell, it can't even run properly because it didn't get Intel microcode updates buried inside the BIOS image.
The UEFI is also a firmware interface burned into the ROM, not the chip itself. UEFI software can pretend to be BIOS software, but it is not BIOS software.
And what, do you think, does hardware initialization on boot, using the code that was piled up over 25 years? What implements idiotic standards such as ACPI? What installs non-removable SMI handlers to mess with your ECC RAM and break your realtime OS? BIOS, that's what! UEFI implementation is a microscopic addition to a festering pile of shit that is PC BIOS. Go, look how they are proud of themselves: http://www.phoenix.com/docs/BridgingBIOStoUEFI_July2007.pdf They taken their BIOS and "made it compatible" by bolting Intel code on top of it. That's the only implementation you will find on anything except, maybe, Apple.
I don't have experience running anything important on Windows.
Fortunately I see enough of examples of this around, without having to make all mistakes by myself.
Revenue is not profit.
UEFI is a standard implemented by BIOS. UEFI implementation is BIOS. There are no "emulators", it's the same old BIOS with UEFI functionality bolted on.
And how do you enter it on all those machines?
I commend you for the use of "M$" despite Microsoft trolls deriding it.
Microsoft has nothing of any importance other than monopoly power they inherited from IBM and money they got through abuse of that monopoly power. Technologically they are just as bankrupt as they are morally.
The only important thing about OpenStack is that it supports implementation of managed, dynamically allocated and partitioned clusters (what "cloud" really is) with LXC, a non-virtualization host partitioning technology.