... unless you had to simulate a Ctrl-Alt-Del key sequence in userland (w/ "system" privileges) without making a keyboard driver/filter ad hoc (quite annoying). By the way, the API may be clean, but the driver API, IMO is extrange/onsense/obscure in comparison to most *nixes (Linux, LynxOS).
... has been done before, also on a fully virtualized context, memory protection, blablabla... PS2 Linux anyone?;-) (greetings to Marcus R. Brown, damn great hacker!)
I received the disks on december 8 '2006, postal box labeled as:
Sun Solaris 10 Media Kit Program Fulfillment and Customer Service by:
BrandVia Alliance, Inc. - Fulfillment Center
2300 Zanker Road Suite E, San Jose, CA 95131, USA
Telephone: 408 955 1750 customerservice@brandvia.com
Reference: 23072-588
To *Your Name*
-reserved-
*Address*
Air Mail $5.05
Contents: Free Solaris 10 Software Media Kit. Commercial Value less than $10
Postal service used: UNITED STATES POSTAGE, from ZIP CODE 95131 to Barcelona (Spain)
The package include 3 DVD:
* 6/06 Solaris 10 Operating System (SPARC DVD)
* 6/06 Solaris 10 Operating System (x64/x86 DVD)
* Developer Tools (Sun Studio 11, Sun Java Studio Creator 2 Update 1, Sun Java Studio Enterprise 8, NetBeans 5.0)
The DVD box shows a photo of castellers, quite curious, as it is typical from where I live (human tower, representing that the union make you stronger, etc.).
Corollarious: I'm glad the DVDs crossed the ocean. Thank you Sun! If Solaris become GPL v3 licensed, I would consider to use it for homebrewed hacking. Although I love Linux, and I will not leave using it, I like the possibility of have a GPL v3 alternative... just in case!
You're right. This occurs in many/most fields, but IMO, the common part is easy to identify: the insulter uses the ignorance of the user in the given field to humiliate him -often explicitly- (forgiving that the expertise is needed because anybody can know everything (!)). As example, it is quite the same about who is good in a field, then extrapolates it to the whole human knowledge: "I'm a superb in *put your job name here*, then I'm a superb human that knows all about everything, and you're a piece of meat". Quite stupid, but unfortunately, there are lots of people of that kind.
P.S. I'm a IT professional, and I don't bash users, as they: 1) trust in my work, I do it for him, like the doctor treat my problems; 2) they, indirectly, pay my bills (it is important to have it present every single moment, as they deserve my respect).
Arthur C. Clarke explains the problems of recovering cables in the book 'How the World Was One' (which sounds quite similar to "How the World Was Won") -excellent book, IMO-.
Embedded systems have both space and boot time constraints, the more bloat you have to load after a reset (e.g. due to Watch-Dog reset) the worse boot times.
You're right. I'm forced to use explicit SSE2 prefetch *also* for x86 out-of-order modern processors to get a 40% memory boost on P4 (netburst, very long pipelines) or 20% on AMD K8 (shorter instruction pipe). Fortunately that it becomes necessary only for streaming (e.g. custom memcopy, compare, DSP, etc.), for general purpose code both P4/PM/Core/K8 are very good.
The dark think about the CELL-PPE, and any other in-order CPU, is that you have to be wise when prefetching: with just one CPU you can prefetch all the time, no problem, but with many CPUs/cores it is important to work with bus saturation possibility in mind(!).
IMO, the problem is not the memory latency, it is the CELL-PPE in-order execution the point that kills performance: the CPU instruction pipe becomes blocked waiting for memory load after cache miss. Most modern CPUs that deal with high latency RAMs are usually out-of-order, for increasing IPC, however, the CELL-PPE in-order CPU has to be programmed with explicit prefetch in mind for avoiding pipe stalls. Don't expect great performance from C/C++ code until the compiler gets decent loop unrolling, pipe stall control optimizations, etc. (explicit prefetch will be still necessary for streaming processing).
I agree. The Linux kit for PS2 was released on '2002 spring as an add-on (I received myself the kit at june '2002), while the PS2 was released almost 2/3 years before (!)
P.S. are you the same 'cronocloud' of the PS2Linux Community phorum?
P.S.2. greetings from PS2Linux 'aragon' user, nice to see you here!
P.S.3. there will be an special context for PS3 Linux development or will be same place as for the PS2 (I still receive messages from the mail list)
I would pay 300 euros for a XBOX/PS3 "Castlevania: Symphony of the Night" 2D kick-ass sequel, promise. Instead of this, we've got Castlevania's "true 3D crap". What the hell these people have in the head? The Nintendo DS 2D games in the top 10 shows that people *is* interested in 2D games, then, why do not follow the line and release some preciosist and hiperdetailed 2D games? (I'm tired of so much 3D unplayable trash).
For these cases there is an alternate, cheap, and usually effective, solution: increase the thread priority of the thread doing TCP 'recv/read'. You're welcome.
P.S. please, be careful when playing with thread priority throttling, it is better keep priority untouched in case you have chances of achieving thread priority inversion (!).
Happens that, IMO, it is unacceptable to do not look to the SW patent extortion^Wportfolios or ignore it, just because "Oh! the free software is so great that the White Knight^W^WIBM will come to protect us and defeat the bastard^W^WMicrosoft". The main problem to the software patents is that corrupts its main objective: to protect innovation, i.e., nowdays the SW patents are used just to erase any little/medium-sized company that "becomes visible" in the market, thus a potential threat.
I think that the community uses the major part of the time looking for escaping to the SW patent problems, but hot to solve it. Without being a professional politician nor a brilliant stratego, I see clear that the problem will only get worse while we're still, while the deep pocket SW monopolists work in the dark to consolidate its future forever.
Comes to my mind few ways of planning such attacks, yes, attacks:
1) Community joint effort, aka, fight with their weapons: create an universal patent portfolio to destroy the big corporation abuse. It is not just use the IBM as your dad, it is about independence. The target it is not to extort per se the industry, but to use the same tools that the big companies use to "protect" themselves (personally, I think that this is a repulsive way, but you can not deserve ethic to soulesss monsters^Wcompanies).
2) Community individual effort, aka, forbid the use of technology to non open sourced projects: forcing to see to big companies *how expensive* is to make a compiler, graphics library, etc. Much like the previous point, with weaker impact, but generalized (generaliced low intensity degradation).
Richard Stallman, which deservers my admiration, respect, and affection, may be it is too much ethical. We should look also for some psichopatic gurus, still with ethics and common sense, but without mercy to actively defeat^Wconvince big corporations to not considere SW nor ideas as patentable.
In the case of Spain, it is generalized, not just US companies. Almost every IT company focuses on short-term optimization, not seing more than one year ahead. Job rotation is here also a lamentable situation, being costly for companies in the mid term. Other perverse branch of job rotation is that affects to product quality, as people need time for adopt the work peculiarities.
Many friends have migrated to other EU countries. It is sad, but the unique out, unless you prefer to opt for other profession. Spain is a good place for working on sales, construction or tourism, but highly skilled IT people wages are far below of what a plumber or truck driver usually makes.
Where I live, HP at Barcelona, they discarded me, after successfully passing the tests, mainly because I didn't accepted their 24k euro/year offer, but a bit more: 30k (think that a 60 square meter flat costs about 1000 euro/month (!)). Sorry, but I do not accept slavery from HP nor from any other company (trust me, I was not there at HP for making big money, just because they do cool stuff, but I have to live, pay the bills et al).
In the past year, after leaving a job, I was considering to migrate to the US (from Spain/Europe), but the conditions were unaceptable. Being 30+ years old, software engineering degree (5 year european university degree), with more than 5 years of work experience, I got no easy ways for being welcome. Nowdays, despite the fact that I would love to work for 4 or 5 years in the USA, for both the experience and for english practice... I'm restricted to Europe (where there are also a ton of lovely places).
Where I live we also have the presure of inmigration, which represents a unfair way to bring local salaries down. If someday I get called by an USA company, I would not accept non USA salaries (if you need highly skilled work force, you'll have to pay at least the local wages, forgiving my "imperfect" english until I can get your local accent, otherwise, pay more to your local workers!).
For finishing this comment, I would like to add that where I live (Barcelona, Spain), the average wages for IT suffer the same slowdown as in the USA (2001..2006), with frozen salaries, et al. The difference is the scale: a highly skilled C++/assembly coder (5 year engineering computer engineering[science] degree, plus 5 years of experience) in Spain earns about 30k euros/year (~21k after taxes), while in Ireland, UK or the USA can achieve from 60 to 90k USD. It is specially dramatic to see that the industrial and IT fields are being eroded, with tons of highly skilled people migrating from Spain to the rest of Europe and USA (due to the low R&D inversion of the country, mainly focused to tourism and construction/building).
My friends, we are fucked around. Any nice place to work in the USA?
RTOS is all about predictability. Hard Real Time OS, such as LynxOS, VxWorks, or QNX, are able, by contract, to guarant you how many microseconds, milliseconds, or seconds you can expect for an operation to finish (as example, ethernet packet dispatching always below X ms, etc.).
Anyone with experience on unix-like RTOSes is probably glad to see RT being introduced into the main branch, as the responsiveness of a RTOS is, by far, much more satisfying. The O(1) scheduler was a nice step forward. The incoming Linux RTOS-like additions, such as preemptible kernel, priority inversion avoidment (not sure if this has been included), etc. will use few more CPU cycles and a bit less disk and I/O throughput, but will boost the user experience. This second step for introducing RT characteristics will not imply Linux becoming Hard RTOS, just a Soft RTOS. In few words: there will few changes related mainly to kernel preemption, in line with TimeSys and BlueCat Linux (i.e. adapting the RT patching to the main branch). I hope that Hard RTOS support will be added in a far future, as it involves driver architecture rewriting (the 2.4 to 2.6 it is trivial in comparison). IMO, it's worth the effort (LynxOS Posix Desktop anyone?;-).
Scientific training, related to maths, physics, chemical, and technological branches, many engineering branches, including computer science, industrial engineering, etc. represents a huge effort, both in time and space (space as people, time as people training periods). Where I live, Europe, most countries have *decades* of continuous science and engineering tradition, not only moved from the individual nor collective desire of making money, but mainly for the desire of knowledge and self growing. There is the technical training, but it is important also the social ingredient. The "hero" paradigm, as icon of the individualism, as a homerian ancient Greece myth representation, makes people think that not only collective efforts are important, in contrast to the Chinese marketting of the "massive critical mass can achieve any conquest" hype.
Chinese people, in my opinion, should be free, feel free, less perfect, less arrogant. We, humans are imperfect, then, chinese too. No propaganda will convert humans into superhumans. Keep your feet on the ground, my friends, the "we are the best" government propaganda *always* is both xenophobic and egoistical, and, of course, never true.
As rule of thumb, the scientific community does not belongs to any concrete country, the scientific community represents the whole human effort in science and technology. Please, do not divide, joining efforts we can reach new frontiers of knowledge, why? just for the joy of knowing and experimenting, for the love itself, love for science and knowledge.
Thanks to all the GNU/Linux community! It is amazing to live it, I find no words for expressing how much I enjoyed, shared, and learned. The future is *ours*!
I know you were kidding, anyway, in most european countries, contracting Tele2 services, you get a swedish IP. My sister has Tele2 as her ISP at Barcelona (Spain), and his IP is reported as swedish. As curiosity, there are many web pages that ban the access depending on your country (G.W. Bush anyone?).
a) ROM code implies adopting some sort of code execution (ISA dependant, p.e. x86/PPC/MIPS/etc), CPU related.
b) There are also dependencies related to the system BOOT process (p.e. IBM-PC / EFI BIOS / Other), i.e. related to the boot "protocol", CPU unrelated.
b) Ignoring (a) and (b) problems, having 9x/xp/*nx drivers built-in in ROM just as backup for your media, note that the BIOS chip is nowdays quite more expensive than the 0.20$ that costs the driver CD, or the ~0$ that costs the driver update download.
In the other hand, what you point could be possible -and interesting- if:
1) Make/adopt an industry standard CPU emulation for booting CPU-independant BIOSes, p.e. using some kind of Java-like CPU emulation (like the way the PPC comunity uses PCI boards with x86 BIOSes).
2) Make/adopt an industry standard BIOS boot protocol.
3) Wait until some PC manufacturer put an 64Mbit BIOS, for loading a 8MB Linux.
BIOS, drivers, and such are so inconvenient given the multiple OS available (which is a good thing). I hope some day someone bring the solution for that nonsense, may be there is necessary some kind of *clean* abstraction layer above these things (and, why not other Linux operating on a secondary CPU I/O dedicated subsystem?).
Yes, it is a good start point. If I was Apple I would wonder if I'm still able to hire Fabrice Bellard... who is/was looking for full time job for a reasonable pay. Hey Steve, think about it!
"public comunicacion of copyrighted material, what makes ilegal sharing it through P2P."
P2P it is not "public communication", as it means "peer to peer", not "many to one" nor "one to many".
You can not get brought to court without being demostrated that you make money of it. That argument is guaranted by law, called "derecho de copia privada" ("private copy right").
Your 4th and 5th paragraphs are false.
Slashdot Mirror
... unless you had to simulate a Ctrl-Alt-Del key sequence in userland (w/ "system" privileges) without making a keyboard driver/filter ad hoc (quite annoying). By the way, the API may be clean, but the driver API, IMO is extrange/onsense/obscure in comparison to most *nixes (Linux, LynxOS).
... has been done before, also on a fully virtualized context, memory protection, blablabla... PS2 Linux anyone? ;-) (greetings to Marcus R. Brown, damn great hacker!)
Sun Solaris 10 Media Kit Program
Fulfillment and Customer Service by:
BrandVia Alliance, Inc. - Fulfillment Center
2300 Zanker Road Suite E, San Jose, CA 95131, USA
Telephone: 408 955 1750 customerservice@brandvia.com
Reference: 23072-588
To *Your Name*
-reserved-
*Address*
Air Mail $5.05
Contents: Free Solaris 10 Software Media Kit. Commercial Value less than $10
Postal service used: UNITED STATES POSTAGE, from ZIP CODE 95131 to Barcelona (Spain)
The package include 3 DVD:
* 6/06 Solaris 10 Operating System (SPARC DVD)
* 6/06 Solaris 10 Operating System (x64/x86 DVD)
* Developer Tools (Sun Studio 11, Sun Java Studio Creator 2 Update 1, Sun Java Studio Enterprise 8, NetBeans 5.0)
The DVD box shows a photo of castellers, quite curious, as it is typical from where I live (human tower, representing that the union make you stronger, etc.).
Corollarious: I'm glad the DVDs crossed the ocean. Thank you Sun! If Solaris become GPL v3 licensed, I would consider to use it for homebrewed hacking. Although I love Linux, and I will not leave using it, I like the possibility of have a GPL v3 alternative... just in case!
You're right. This occurs in many/most fields, but IMO, the common part is easy to identify: the insulter uses the ignorance of the user in the given field to humiliate him -often explicitly- (forgiving that the expertise is needed because anybody can know everything (!)). As example, it is quite the same about who is good in a field, then extrapolates it to the whole human knowledge: "I'm a superb in *put your job name here*, then I'm a superb human that knows all about everything, and you're a piece of meat". Quite stupid, but unfortunately, there are lots of people of that kind.
P.S. I'm a IT professional, and I don't bash users, as they: 1) trust in my work, I do it for him, like the doctor treat my problems; 2) they, indirectly, pay my bills (it is important to have it present every single moment, as they deserve my respect).
Arthur C. Clarke explains the problems of recovering cables in the book 'How the World Was One' (which sounds quite similar to "How the World Was Won") -excellent book, IMO-.
Embedded systems have both space and boot time constraints, the more bloat you have to load after a reset (e.g. due to Watch-Dog reset) the worse boot times.
It is a problem for the embedded market (!)
You're right. I'm forced to use explicit SSE2 prefetch *also* for x86 out-of-order modern processors to get a 40% memory boost on P4 (netburst, very long pipelines) or 20% on AMD K8 (shorter instruction pipe). Fortunately that it becomes necessary only for streaming (e.g. custom memcopy, compare, DSP, etc.), for general purpose code both P4/PM/Core/K8 are very good.
The dark think about the CELL-PPE, and any other in-order CPU, is that you have to be wise when prefetching: with just one CPU you can prefetch all the time, no problem, but with many CPUs/cores it is important to work with bus saturation possibility in mind(!).
IMO, the problem is not the memory latency, it is the CELL-PPE in-order execution the point that kills performance: the CPU instruction pipe becomes blocked waiting for memory load after cache miss. Most modern CPUs that deal with high latency RAMs are usually out-of-order, for increasing IPC, however, the CELL-PPE in-order CPU has to be programmed with explicit prefetch in mind for avoiding pipe stalls. Don't expect great performance from C/C++ code until the compiler gets decent loop unrolling, pipe stall control optimizations, etc. (explicit prefetch will be still necessary for streaming processing).
I agree. The Linux kit for PS2 was released on '2002 spring as an add-on (I received myself the kit at june '2002), while the PS2 was released almost 2/3 years before (!)
P.S. are you the same 'cronocloud' of the PS2Linux Community phorum?
P.S.2. greetings from PS2Linux 'aragon' user, nice to see you here!
P.S.3. there will be an special context for PS3 Linux development or will be same place as for the PS2 (I still receive messages from the mail list)
I would pay 300 euros for a XBOX/PS3 "Castlevania: Symphony of the Night" 2D kick-ass sequel, promise. Instead of this, we've got Castlevania's "true 3D crap". What the hell these people have in the head? The Nintendo DS 2D games in the top 10 shows that people *is* interested in 2D games, then, why do not follow the line and release some preciosist and hiperdetailed 2D games? (I'm tired of so much 3D unplayable trash).
For these cases there is an alternate, cheap, and usually effective, solution: increase the thread priority of the thread doing TCP 'recv/read'. You're welcome.
P.S. please, be careful when playing with thread priority throttling, it is better keep priority untouched in case you have chances of achieving thread priority inversion (!).
Happens that, IMO, it is unacceptable to do not look to the SW patent extortion^Wportfolios or ignore it, just because "Oh! the free software is so great that the White Knight^W^WIBM will come to protect us and defeat the bastard^W^WMicrosoft". The main problem to the software patents is that corrupts its main objective: to protect innovation, i.e., nowdays the SW patents are used just to erase any little/medium-sized company that "becomes visible" in the market, thus a potential threat.
I think that the community uses the major part of the time looking for escaping to the SW patent problems, but hot to solve it. Without being a professional politician nor a brilliant stratego, I see clear that the problem will only get worse while we're still, while the deep pocket SW monopolists work in the dark to consolidate its future forever.
Comes to my mind few ways of planning such attacks, yes, attacks:
1) Community joint effort, aka, fight with their weapons: create an universal patent portfolio to destroy the big corporation abuse. It is not just use the IBM as your dad, it is about independence. The target it is not to extort per se the industry, but to use the same tools that the big companies use to "protect" themselves (personally, I think that this is a repulsive way, but you can not deserve ethic to soulesss monsters^Wcompanies).
2) Community individual effort, aka, forbid the use of technology to non open sourced projects: forcing to see to big companies *how expensive* is to make a compiler, graphics library, etc. Much like the previous point, with weaker impact, but generalized (generaliced low intensity degradation).
Richard Stallman, which deservers my admiration, respect, and affection, may be it is too much ethical. We should look also for some psichopatic gurus, still with ethics and common sense, but without mercy to actively defeat^Wconvince big corporations to not considere SW nor ideas as patentable.
In the case of Spain, it is generalized, not just US companies. Almost every IT company focuses on short-term optimization, not seing more than one year ahead. Job rotation is here also a lamentable situation, being costly for companies in the mid term. Other perverse branch of job rotation is that affects to product quality, as people need time for adopt the work peculiarities.
Many friends have migrated to other EU countries. It is sad, but the unique out, unless you prefer to opt for other profession. Spain is a good place for working on sales, construction or tourism, but highly skilled IT people wages are far below of what a plumber or truck driver usually makes.
Where I live, HP at Barcelona, they discarded me, after successfully passing the tests, mainly because I didn't accepted their 24k euro/year offer, but a bit more: 30k (think that a 60 square meter flat costs about 1000 euro/month (!)). Sorry, but I do not accept slavery from HP nor from any other company (trust me, I was not there at HP for making big money, just because they do cool stuff, but I have to live, pay the bills et al).
In the past year, after leaving a job, I was considering to migrate to the US (from Spain/Europe), but the conditions were unaceptable. Being 30+ years old, software engineering degree (5 year european university degree), with more than 5 years of work experience, I got no easy ways for being welcome. Nowdays, despite the fact that I would love to work for 4 or 5 years in the USA, for both the experience and for english practice... I'm restricted to Europe (where there are also a ton of lovely places).
Where I live we also have the presure of inmigration, which represents a unfair way to bring local salaries down. If someday I get called by an USA company, I would not accept non USA salaries (if you need highly skilled work force, you'll have to pay at least the local wages, forgiving my "imperfect" english until I can get your local accent, otherwise, pay more to your local workers!).
For finishing this comment, I would like to add that where I live (Barcelona, Spain), the average wages for IT suffer the same slowdown as in the USA (2001..2006), with frozen salaries, et al. The difference is the scale: a highly skilled C++/assembly coder (5 year engineering computer engineering[science] degree, plus 5 years of experience) in Spain earns about 30k euros/year (~21k after taxes), while in Ireland, UK or the USA can achieve from 60 to 90k USD. It is specially dramatic to see that the industrial and IT fields are being eroded, with tons of highly skilled people migrating from Spain to the rest of Europe and USA (due to the low R&D inversion of the country, mainly focused to tourism and construction/building).
My friends, we are fucked around. Any nice place to work in the USA?
IBM have been providing encryption hardware for laptops for a while.
RTOS is all about predictability. Hard Real Time OS, such as LynxOS, VxWorks, or QNX, are able, by contract, to guarant you how many microseconds, milliseconds, or seconds you can expect for an operation to finish (as example, ethernet packet dispatching always below X ms, etc.).
;-).
Anyone with experience on unix-like RTOSes is probably glad to see RT being introduced into the main branch, as the responsiveness of a RTOS is, by far, much more satisfying. The O(1) scheduler was a nice step forward. The incoming Linux RTOS-like additions, such as preemptible kernel, priority inversion avoidment (not sure if this has been included), etc. will use few more CPU cycles and a bit less disk and I/O throughput, but will boost the user experience. This second step for introducing RT characteristics will not imply Linux becoming Hard RTOS, just a Soft RTOS. In few words: there will few changes related mainly to kernel preemption, in line with TimeSys and BlueCat Linux (i.e. adapting the RT patching to the main branch). I hope that Hard RTOS support will be added in a far future, as it involves driver architecture rewriting (the 2.4 to 2.6 it is trivial in comparison). IMO, it's worth the effort (LynxOS Posix Desktop anyone?
Scientific training, related to maths, physics, chemical, and technological branches, many engineering branches, including computer science, industrial engineering, etc. represents a huge effort, both in time and space (space as people, time as people training periods). Where I live, Europe, most countries have *decades* of continuous science and engineering tradition, not only moved from the individual nor collective desire of making money, but mainly for the desire of knowledge and self growing. There is the technical training, but it is important also the social ingredient. The "hero" paradigm, as icon of the individualism, as a homerian ancient Greece myth representation, makes people think that not only collective efforts are important, in contrast to the Chinese marketting of the "massive critical mass can achieve any conquest" hype.
Chinese people, in my opinion, should be free, feel free, less perfect, less arrogant. We, humans are imperfect, then, chinese too. No propaganda will convert humans into superhumans. Keep your feet on the ground, my friends, the "we are the best" government propaganda *always* is both xenophobic and egoistical, and, of course, never true.
As rule of thumb, the scientific community does not belongs to any concrete country, the scientific community represents the whole human effort in science and technology. Please, do not divide, joining efforts we can reach new frontiers of knowledge, why? just for the joy of knowing and experimenting, for the love itself, love for science and knowledge.
Thanks to all the GNU/Linux community! It is amazing to live it, I find no words for expressing how much I enjoyed, shared, and learned. The future is *ours*!
I know you were kidding, anyway, in most european countries, contracting Tele2 services, you get a swedish IP. My sister has Tele2 as her ISP at Barcelona (Spain), and his IP is reported as swedish. As curiosity, there are many web pages that ban the access depending on your country (G.W. Bush anyone?).
Also, Virtual PC -from the Connectix era, and also nowdays- runs LynxOS 3.1/4.0 (Hard Real Time OS UNIX), where VMWare fails.
Manufacturers don't do it because of:
a) ROM code implies adopting some sort of code execution (ISA dependant, p.e. x86/PPC/MIPS/etc), CPU related.
b) There are also dependencies related to the system BOOT process (p.e. IBM-PC / EFI BIOS / Other), i.e. related to the boot "protocol", CPU unrelated.
b) Ignoring (a) and (b) problems, having 9x/xp/*nx drivers built-in in ROM just as backup for your media, note that the BIOS chip is nowdays quite more expensive than the 0.20$ that costs the driver CD, or the ~0$ that costs the driver update download.
In the other hand, what you point could be possible -and interesting- if:
1) Make/adopt an industry standard CPU emulation for booting CPU-independant BIOSes, p.e. using some kind of Java-like CPU emulation (like the way the PPC comunity uses PCI boards with x86 BIOSes).
2) Make/adopt an industry standard BIOS boot protocol.
3) Wait until some PC manufacturer put an 64Mbit BIOS, for loading a 8MB Linux.
BIOS, drivers, and such are so inconvenient given the multiple OS available (which is a good thing). I hope some day someone bring the solution for that nonsense, may be there is necessary some kind of *clean* abstraction layer above these things (and, why not other Linux operating on a secondary CPU I/O dedicated subsystem?).
Yes, it is a good start point. If I was Apple I would wonder if I'm still able to hire Fabrice Bellard... who is/was looking for full time job for a reasonable pay. Hey Steve, think about it!
"public comunicacion of copyrighted material, what makes ilegal sharing it through P2P." P2P it is not "public communication", as it means "peer to peer", not "many to one" nor "one to many".
You can not get brought to court without being demostrated that you make money of it. That argument is guaranted by law, called "derecho de copia privada" ("private copy right").
Your 4th and 5th paragraphs are false.