Hardly a BIOS. Hardly Basic. Most (nearly all) BIOSes don't even drive the device in either interrupt or DMA mode. I think the use of the term BIOS is very misleading. Proper device drivers do, of course (I've written enough of them!).
Wouldn't have been my choice of words either, but the BIOS was actually written originally to provide the low level interface to the hardware.
Yes...circa 1977 as I recall....!
And used to be used in DOS days (and even then I used to spend a fair amount of effort circumventing it then to gain either speed, or a fighting change that something would work in the first place (i.e. serial comms))...
Some BIOS calls carried on for a bit in Win95. Can't think of anything that current windows use it for though.
Of course it does, but the EFI bit makes sure that
- Apple stuff won't boot on generic PC hardware
- the APple marketing people can add another piEce Of BS tO theiR marketing s**te to tell mac gopis how wonderful life is when sitting at Guru Jobs' kneees.
I have found that Mac people don't want to hear the truth - that a Mac is in fact juts a over priced PC running a prettier and slightly more stable windowing system that runs slower, has less hardware and software support, but otherwise is just after all another bloody computer..
Orginally BIOS was the shim code between the OS generic drivers and the hardware specific stuff.
What we would now call device drivers.
IBM shoved a lt of it in ROM, which was fine for about 6 months, till peole realised it was dog slow in ROM and started copying it into RAM, and then bypassing it all together.Since it represented something hardware specific and took up ram space anyway.
These days its no more than what it takes to boot the kernel.
The REAL BIOS is in the kernel.
MMM. Think the term may go back a bit earlier than that..that sounds like the CP/M bios there..
CP/M was the first system to use the term, and that was around 1977 AFAIR.
But the point is...it was a *Basic* Input/Output System. Kernel drivers in modern systems are hardly basic!
I stand by what I said.. can you show me why you *need* to run as admin?
MBQ
Suit yourself.
Because far too much Winblows software assumes it has write privileges to the whole system and either bitches or simply doesn't work properly when it doesn't.
Another one of the myriad reasons I won't use Gate's bundle of bugs and security vulnerabilities that he laughingly calls an "operating system".
I'm quite happy to hear the truth.
That wasn't the truth, HTH.
So how many Macs have you used over what sort of period of time?
As you claim. However I have none that does and I expect thats true for most users. I run similar stuff to what most user will run including:- office, compilers, databases, games, video editting. none at admin level.
Apparantly you do so for the wrong reasons as you don't actually understand windows. I bet you don't actually understand Linux either if you think it is significantly better than windows. As a user of both I can assure you that both have problems and niether is perfect.
Enough to know taht I agree with the assertion.
MBQ
No, go on, how many and what versions of the OS? Try not avoiding the question.
Says it all. Huge and I aren't just "users".
Over priced - possibly. You might argue you get some nice design and aesthetics for your money.
Prettier certainly.
More stable inherently, and also by virtue of there being less malware targeted at the platform.
Slower - not really - it varies with application, but on similar hardware there is not a noticeable difference in application performance. Compared to vista it flys!
Less hardware support? Less than XP, but more than Vista. You can generally find most of the hardware you need though.
Software support - main apps covered well, some specialist stuff not well catered for. These days with the ability to run virtual platforms so easily that seems less of an issue.
Ease of use and the ability to get useful stuff done out of the box is better. Learning times are reduced and clueless users are less likely to shoot themselves in the foot. The old issue of macs nannying the user and making it hard for people who do know what they are doing get low level control, no longer really apply since the transition to OSX.
Says it all really.. treat the users with contempt and wonder why you can't give it away. ;-) BTW I am not just a user either having written kernel level code in Unix in the past.
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