OpenFirmware for the PC would be nice. Standards like OpenFirmware just have no place on a PC. Requiring hardware manufacturers to, for once, actually have to abide by EXACTLY ONE standard will just not happen.
A new platform will have to be conconcted to house all the shit sound/video/ethernet cards people are using now. With some "BIOS" implementation that'll be just as bad, or worse, if that's possible.
Floppy disk sales will plummet, what with firmware being built-into cards, and people being able to netboot their PC's, or EVEN BOOT OFF THE SECOND HARD DISK.
Windows XP SP3 will only boot from said "BIOS", OpenFirmware x86 will never be MS supported. Ugh, it says it's "open".
Hardware detection on the PC will probably always be shoddy, because most hardware for them is shoddy. No two BIOS's are the same. An abundance of cards exist that rely on Windows driver code to do the work the hardware should, so even if you detect it you can't use it.
Let's take an example: basically, you can't _not_ detect all of the hardware on a Macintosh, thanks to OpenFirmware. It's not the job of the OS to determine the hardware, good firmware should take care of that, and present a nice list to the OS of what's available, and at what addresses.
If only the PC lost to the Macintosh, it might be a nice world in spite of the fact we'd still have copies of Windows running around, just for different (better) architectures.
"Hardware Detection" would be a term used only inside of labs actually making the hardware/firmware. OS's could get on with, well, Operating.
Actually BSD's are more logical and easier to understand. BSD's consist of whole OS, not just kernel with some glued crap on top.
>3. It lacks a GUI of any note.
In FreeBSD: $locate XFree86/usr/ports/x11/XFree86-4
$cd/usr/ports/x11/XFree86-4 $make install clean And of course there's lots of Window Manager for it.
>4. There is no support available for it.
Check bsdmall.com, there's plenty of support options for it.
>5. It is an assortment of fragmented OSes.
As i previously said i would claim Linux as so. as i said BSD's are the whole OSes, not lot's of stuff glued together.
>6. It cannot be run on the x86 platform.
FreeBSD is very robust on x86 and runs it on well, better than Linux imho (overall system response, bootup time etc.)
>7. You have to compile everything and know C.
At least in FreeBSD you can add binary packages easily by typing pkd_add , or use ports which does all the compiling and dependencies for you (similiar to Gentoo's Portage).
>8. Support for the latest hardware is always poor.
This is partially true, though Linux isn't much better at this either. BSD developers usually prefer more robust implementations (For DSL they buy DSL box, not those crappy DSL PCI-cards etc) so hardware that is supported in BSD runs well.
>9. It is incompatiable with GNU/Linux.
How come there is Linux Binary Compability which runs very nicely and without performance hit.
>10.It is dying.
Netcraft's recent study claims BSD's healthy and is growing: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/07/12/nearl y_2_million_active_sites_running_freebsd.html
Slashdot Mirror
...take this into consideration. :-)
...Adobemedia Dreamlive.
OpenFirmware for the PC would be nice. Standards like OpenFirmware just have no place on a PC. Requiring hardware manufacturers to, for once, actually have to abide by EXACTLY ONE standard will just not happen.
A new platform will have to be conconcted to house all the shit sound/video/ethernet cards people are using now. With some "BIOS" implementation that'll be just as bad, or worse, if that's possible.
Floppy disk sales will plummet, what with firmware being built-into cards, and people being able to netboot their PC's, or EVEN BOOT OFF THE SECOND HARD DISK.
Windows XP SP3 will only boot from said "BIOS", OpenFirmware x86 will never be MS supported. Ugh, it says it's "open".
Hardware detection on the PC will probably always be shoddy, because most hardware for them is shoddy. No two BIOS's are the same. An abundance of cards exist that rely on Windows driver code to do the work the hardware should, so even if you detect it you can't use it.
Let's take an example: basically, you can't _not_ detect all of the hardware on a Macintosh, thanks to OpenFirmware. It's not the job of the OS to determine the hardware, good firmware should take care of that, and present a nice list to the OS of what's available, and at what addresses.
If only the PC lost to the Macintosh, it might be a nice world in spite of the fact we'd still have copies of Windows running around, just for different (better) architectures.
"Hardware Detection" would be a term used only inside of labs actually making the hardware/firmware. OS's could get on with, well, Operating.
See this posting.
Basically they're just IA-32 architecture without it's most worst design errors.
1. 8 registers increased to 16 (it still sucks compared to SPARC's 128).
2. Larger addressing width (eg. can allocate more than 4GB of memory limited by 32-bit architectures). Alpha and MIPS had this capability in 1992.
3. NX bit (can prevent buffer overflows). Has been available for ages on good CPU architectures.
MIPS R12000 system that's sitting on my desk has 8MB of L2 cache. And yes, it's circa 2000.
MIPS R4000 and Alpha 21064 were 64 bit processors back in 1992.
Go in to System Preferences, click Bluetooth applet, check "Support Non-Conforming Phones".
>1. You can not play games on it.
/usr/ports/x11/XFree86-4
/usr/ports/x11/XFree86-4
l y_2_million_active_sites_running_freebsd.html
Who cares.
>2. It cannot be used by my grandma.
Actually BSD's are more logical and easier to understand. BSD's consist of whole OS, not just kernel with some glued crap on top.
>3. It lacks a GUI of any note.
In FreeBSD:
$locate XFree86
$cd
$make install clean
And of course there's lots of Window Manager for it.
>4. There is no support available for it.
Check bsdmall.com, there's plenty of support options for it.
>5. It is an assortment of fragmented OSes.
As i previously said i would claim Linux as so. as i said BSD's are the whole OSes, not lot's of stuff glued together.
>6. It cannot be run on the x86 platform.
FreeBSD is very robust on x86 and runs it on well, better than Linux imho (overall system response, bootup time etc.)
>7. You have to compile everything and know C.
At least in FreeBSD you can add binary packages easily by typing pkd_add , or use ports which does all the compiling and dependencies for you (similiar to Gentoo's Portage).
>8. Support for the latest hardware is always poor.
This is partially true, though Linux isn't much better at this either. BSD developers usually prefer more robust implementations (For DSL they buy DSL box, not those crappy DSL PCI-cards etc) so hardware that is supported in BSD runs well.
>9. It is incompatiable with GNU/Linux.
How come there is Linux Binary Compability which runs very nicely and without performance hit.
>10.It is dying.
Netcraft's recent study claims BSD's healthy and is growing: http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2003/07/12/near