Legacy-Free PCs 701
JeffM2001 writes "InformationWeek is running a story by Fred Langa which gives an overview of the ways to create a true-Legacy-free computer. Finally we can have a PC not based on twenty year old technology." Update: 04/07 17:34 GMT by T : Pages past the first one of this article seem just to loop; here's the printable version, which has the whole article in one go.
I'd rather... (Score:5, Funny)
-s
Re:I'd rather... (Score:5, Insightful)
You are still using the wheel arent you?
Re:I'd rather... (Score:4, Funny)
Definitly! We tried upgrading our cars to run on Wheel95 but they just kept crashing!
Re:I'd rather... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, but with anti-lock, disc brakes, electronically controlled suspension, and tires that weigh half what their counterparts just ten years ago did...
We're still using Turing machines, true, but without tapes...
That having been said it's a lot easier to slap RS232 on a device than it is USB... but that's just a question of time before the USB chips become as cheap/easy as UART's...
Re:I'd rather... (Score:4, Insightful)
When is that going to be? Let's try never.
I designed and built a UART in my first digital design class. The point isn't that cheap==easy, the point is that the protocol is so much simpler for RS232 than it is for USB.
Creating a USB device requires all sorts of stuff to comply with the standard. They don't put anti-lock brakes on wheelbarrows and never will, no matter how cheap they get. It doesn't make any sense.
What, like x86 instruction set? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I'd rather... (Score:3, Funny)
cowboy neal carries me on his back.
Re:I'd rather... (Score:3, Insightful)
XP/2000/NT have 'emulation' of a DOS command prompt. They are not legacy, but instead are just being 'clever' (some may argue this).
Under your definition there is no OS that isn't legacy. MacOS X run on Unix, all Windows variants have a command prompt of some means......, BeOS...., oS2... Linux, BSD, Solaris.......
If I built a totally new OS with no command prompt, yet someone created a terminal emulation program or DOS command prompt emulation program, and I included it in my OS, would that make m
Re:RTFa and you find an Intel PR Rant (Score:4, Insightful)
-Industry is so keen on getting us to abandon our PS/2 keyboard and Centronics parallel ports.
-In theory, fewer connectors and less space taken on the chipset components should be cheaper
-Yet, the only "legacy-free" parts I see are either in OEM systems (and generally not for individual consumption), or sold to enthusiasts as wow special at a high price.
I can get decent full-legacy Athlon mainboards at USD 50-70. Why should I pay twice as much if not more for a legacy-free board, and actually get LESS?
Aside: if you're freeing all that mainboard space, can't you find something better to do with it than 144 USB ports? The whole point of USB is that you can use hubs and daisy-chaining so one or two ports should be enough.
What does it RUN then? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What does it RUN then? (Score:3, Informative)
its not truly legacy-free (Score:3, Funny)
Re:its not truly legacy-free (Score:2, Informative)
Re:its not truly legacy-free (Score:3, Informative)
We can have a PC not based on twenty year old tech (Score:5, Funny)
Re:We can have a PC not based on twenty year old t (Score:4, Insightful)
A legacy free OS is about as useful as a legacy free automobile. There is this thing called evolution which is how tools, machines, and software develop. Because of evolution you can easily look at a modern tool and compare its lineage to an old tool.
For example just because you can compare a modern laser cutter with a sharp rock some one used a five thousand years ago doesn't mean the new technology it worthless or even the same because it serves the same function.
Linux(the OS based on 30 year old tech) is NOT 30 year old tech. That's a stupid arguement to make. Fundementals don't change and throwing away 30 years of knowledge would be foolish.
The PC legacy is more than 20 years old (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:We can have a PC not based on twenty year old t (Score:3, Funny)
At least in Unix the slashes run the right way, and text files don't use silly two-byte line terminators.
Re:We can have a PC not based on twenty year old t (Score:4, Funny)
Primitive is right - it's the 21st century, wheres my f***ing flying car ?
Re:We can have a PC not based on twenty year old t (Score:3, Insightful)
broken link (Score:5, Informative)
Full article on one page (Score:2)
Re:broken link (Score:5, Informative)
I don't understand why Slashdot doesn't always link to the 'printable version', I doubt that many people prefer to click through pages 1 to 5 rather than just scrolling through the whole article.
Ads (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ads (Score:4, Insightful)
-Restil
No sale here (Score:3, Insightful)
After all, the whole idea of a printable version is to serve up the content without all the blinking, annoying, distracting ads and other crap that adorn most sites.
While the printable version has more text content, it should have a much lower overhead on whatever dynamic content engine is being used to decypher cookies, do database lookups, and serve up the so-called targetted advertisements. All you've got is
Unfortunately... (Score:5, Interesting)
This is the sort of thing emulation and hardware adapters were made for.
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:5, Funny)
Obsession? How about just plain old usability? (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah... like that USB -> serial adapter that works fine for generic use on my laptop, but blocks a 'BREAK' signal, making it COMPLETELY useless for resetting Cisco routers?
THAT is why I prefer a REAL serial port over some contraption somebody dreamed up.
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:5, Insightful)
For instance, RS232 ports: What exactly is wrong with an RS232 port? Why is it "worse" than a USB port? There's no difficulty in actually using an RS232 port - UARTs are cheap, they're brain-dead easy to interface to, and they support rather modern interface methods (DMA, etc.). They are, however, low speed - but of course, for low speed operations that's all you need. You will never need high-speed data transfer to your keyboard or mouse - they're inherently low data transfer devices, since humans are slow.
Same goes for ISA slots and parallel ports. They don't hold back the state of the art. They're add-ons. If you don't use them, they don't do anything. It's just a memory space that doesn't get accessed. If you're complaining about their implementation on current PCs (the fact that they sit in I/O space, take up IRQs, etc.) then you're complaining about the BIOS, not the peripherals. I really didn't see the point of replacing the PS/2 keyboard and mouse. They're just serial devices - they interface via the same method that UARTs, etc. get addressed, which is ridiculously easy to interface to.
There is nothing fundamentally wrong with legacy components. Interfacing to a UART is trivial. Much more trivial than with USB, in fact. There's no reason a "clean" design of a PC couldn't have a serial port, ISA slot, ATA hard drives, and everything else.
Even the x86 architecture thing is 'not that bad'. Take the x87 architecture - everyone complains about the FXCH instruction, because it IS stupid, but on the P3 and Athlon (but not the P4 - one reason the P4's FP sucks) that instruction's 'free' - it takes 0 clock cycles to process. There's some overhead involved with it, but it's not clear to me that the small gain from fixing the overhead loss would offset the large loss of not being compatible with large portions of x87 software. And it's not clear to me that the overhead couldn't be compensated for in some other way, as well.
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, there is something "wrong" with legacy components. You can't easily establish DRM on standardized and established technology.
Why USB is better than UART (Score:5, Informative)
Standard serial ports don't have a power supply with a well-specified current budget (you have to use wierd parasitic power supplies that don't always work on laptop serial ports).
Serial ports require negative voltages (more workarounds with switched-capacitor inverters).
Serial ports don't have a reliable way to detect plug and unplug events.
Serial ports don't have a standard way to identify the type of device plugged in.
Serial ports cannot be expanded and chained with hubs.
Serial ports require an interrupt per byte and are connected on the legacy ISA bus - each I/O cycle takes nearly a microsecond (thousands of cycles on a modern PC!). A USB controller is a bus-mastering PCI device with a scheduler driven by table data structures.
Serial ports are slower. Sure, USB 1.1 is not terribly fast at 12mbps but it was a design compromise to keep it cheap enough so you can build a mouse for less than $1 material cost.
Serial ports don't have isochronous transfer modes for timing-sensitive data like audio and modem signals.
A DB9 connector is less friendly than the USB connector. I hate those retaining screws.
A DB9 connector is not designed with recessed pins for better ESD protection.
A DB9 connector is not designed with data pins recessed farther than the power and ground pins for safe hot insertion and removal.
Serial ports use an antiquated notion of DCE and DTE to determine connector gender and everyone generally screws it up so gender changers are occasionally necessary.
Yes. A UART interface is trivial. Except when you have to find out why it's not working (oops, it's disabled or set up in the BIOS as an IRDA port).
Serial ports don't have predefined device classes so a variety of devices can use a standard driver.
Sure, all this comes at a certain price and the Microsoft implementation of USB PnP and standard device class drivers leaves something do be desired but it's generally an improvement over UARTs.
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:3, Interesting)
My complaint isn't that legacy interfaces take up system resource space like IRQ's
My complaint is that they take up PHYSICAL space.
All other things equal, most external PC peripherals would run fine on USB. But rather than just a row of USB ports on the back of my machine, I have a PS/2 mouse jack, and a PS/2 keyboard jack, and two serial ports, and one parallel port...
And even a joystick port. I think that one originated on the PCjr. No one even makes devices for the joystick port anymore (only 2 ana
Re:Unfortunately... (Score:4, Interesting)
That's not true, actually. Having to support ISA complicates timing and degrades performance of the PCI bus it is generally attached to. There are very good reasons for eliminating the ISA slot, and frankly I'm suprised it held out as long as it did.
Broken URL (Score:4, Informative)
Rus
Legacy links (Score:4, Funny)
Let's hear it for legacy free! (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's hear it for flash media formats, DVI, USB, SATA, and Firewire!
I'd prefer that my next motherboard contain only modern I/O ports. I wish that more vendors offered them, but they don't. The ones that do, do so at exorbitant prices.
Re:Let's hear it for legacy free! (Score:5, Insightful)
audio I/O, USB, Firewire, 10/100 ethernet (10/100/1000 on powerbook/powermac), VGA, DVI/ADC, modem.
No sign of those rs-232, or parallel ports. No ps2 or keyboard ports either.
Re:Let's hear it for legacy free! (Score:5, Insightful)
I wish that more vendors offered them, but they don't. The ones that do, do so at exorbitant prices.
Aye, there's the rub.
The original IBM PC had the advantage of being standardized and allowed other vendors to implement those same standards.
While there's some hope that the legacy-free PC will implement interfaces that conform closely to freely-available published standards (USB, IEEE1394), there's always this temptation: companies (Rambus) would love to own a standard and just have the checks come rolling in.
The success of breaking PCs free of legacy hardware will hinge on whether similarly-unencumbered new standards are there to take the place of the old ones.
InfoWeek having issues (Score:3, Informative)
Re:InfoWeek having issues (Score:3, Informative)
Re:InfoWeek having issues (Score:4, Funny)
Hmph (Score:3, Funny)
1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | Next Page (Score:5, Funny)
The link is broken. (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.informationweek.com/story/IWK20030404S
Legacy, schmegacy (Score:5, Funny)
Legacy ehh??? (Score:5, Funny)
Back in my day we would kill for those Legacy based PC's, I remember a time where the i386 and 8mb of ram would be some fancy stuff, but nooooo... these days all you whipper snappers want is speed and pretty colors on your pretty little flat panel doohickies, well I remem...
<old man status?="snooze mode"> zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
</status>
**end rant**
How about legacy-free cars ? (Score:5, Funny)
1) pneumatic tires
2) internal combustion engine
3) suspension
bla bla bla
I don't think flying cars will ever get here
WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
ANYWAY, I fail to see why legacy is such a bad thing. Just because it's 20 years old doesn't mean it needs to go away. Using this guy's philosophy, Ethernet is 30 years old, and obviously that's a bottleneck compared to newer technologies like token ring and Turbo Arcnet. UNIX is over 30 years old, and obviously it's a bottleneck compared to the young NT kernel.
Just because the PC's core is 20 years old, I'm not sure why we suddenly need to drop everything and change it.
Re:WTF (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't see where legacy hardwar is a bad thing. I have an athlon XP 1800+ and a bunch of fairly new hardware, but I still use my ps2 ports, my paralell port, and my com port on a daily basis.
I think it's a good thing to have a lowest common denominator when dealing with hardware. I think it's a good idea to always have the floppy drive to fall back on.
I ran into an instance just a little while ago where I had to have one. I tried to make my primary hard drive the drive which was on a Raid controller. For some reason, windows XP didn't have the driver for my onboard promise ata100 raid chipset, and couldn't find the drive. So, in the installation procedure, i had to load an external driver ("press F6 to load a 3rd party scsi or raid driver"). The only option for loading the driver was a floppy - can't do it from a CD (or at least i couldn't figure out how to)
But, it's nice knowing that, if nothing else, you have ps2 ports for any old keyboard and a floppy drive for booting emergencies. Proven technology is a good thing. Besides, why throw out an essentially good design? Yeah, as the article says it's all based on the AT spec, but, we've gone beyond 4MB of ram, we're no longer using AT keyboards, we've ditched the com port mouse, we're using 15 pin SVGA monitor plugs instead of the oldskool 9-pin, our ram isn't 30 pin or 72 pin simms anymore, we're using 168pin sdram, and even that's on it's way out, in favor of 184 pin ddr. The BNC network connections are gone, as are the 15 pin connections. We're using ATX soft-off power supplies now. I haven't used an ISA slot in 4 years, and it's been 2 since I've owned a motherboard with one on it (well, that's a daily user anyway).
I say, let these things work themselves out. Compared to the 1984 picture in that article, most of our computers are legacy-free - think about how many pieces of hardware you have right now that would connect to a 286. My speakers? My floppy? Mabey the hard drive? Yeah, that's about it.
It's not about creating a legacy-free PC. It's about the continual evolution of the existing PC into the next big changes. We're doing just fine so far, why bash the basis we've been going on as we evolve for 20 years? It's got us this far, let's ride it out a little further, see where it goes.
~Will
Yes, well, here is my experience... (Score:5, Interesting)
Guess what I had absolutely 0 problems with: yes, Windows XP.
My point is that when you buy a non-legacy free motherboard you have a CHOICE of using usb / usb2 / firewire rather than serial parallel and ps2 but if you get stuck with an OS that does not really support it, well, you are truly stuck!
Re:Yes, well, here is my experience... (Score:2)
if slack can do it, the others can.
Re:Yes, well, here is my experience... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Yes, well, here is my experience... (Score:3, Funny)
With USB, suddenly all those signal can be transmitted digitally at USB speeds. This means my compute
Re:Yes, well, here is my experience... (Score:5, Interesting)
It makes me think that this entire "no more legacy hardware" concept is more about taking control over the hardware away from the user (thereby making it -- as you discovered -- less usable for alternative OSs, not to mention more friendly to DRM-in-hardware) than it is about ditching old tech that's "holding us back".
I'll take my interchangeable legacy devices and complete lack of integrated anything over a technological jump that nonetheless reduces both broad-spectrum usability and user options.
Install Gentoo in achrooted env via Mandrake (Score:3, Informative)
Install Mandrake on one set, then use a chrooted envoronment to install Gentoo on the other set. This has several advantages.
Productivity (Score:3, Insightful)
Yea, wasting hundreds of dollars per desktop is a real way to optimize business. Opening yourself up to more security flaws, locking yousrself into stricter licensing schemes, and forcing yourself to upgrade your hardware to deal with the bloat of the new OS are all real productivity and performance enhancers.
Repeat this process until someone in upper management gets hit with a clue stick, or your company has had to lay off half the IT staff just to upgrade to the amazing Windows 2003 .NET server with integrated XP/PLUS! desktops and Office 10 for just under $500,000.
Legacy Hardware (Score:2, Interesting)
"Legacy" means "works" (Score:5, Insightful)
will this give us a legacy-free printer? (Score:2)
Re:will this give us a legacy-free printer? (Score:2)
Buy a new Mac & install 10.2.4 (Score:2, Informative)
That said, if you buy a unit that can boot into OS9 you can run just about everything Apple has ever made (even Apple I hardware and software) and just about everything any third party has ever made through some sort of adapter (PCI to nubus adapters even exist) - I don't know of a single thing other than the previous () hardware or software (natively or through emulation) that can't run on dual boot Mac.
All that said, the newest Macs are completely
Only partly legacy-free (Score:3, Insightful)
- legacy 80x86 CPU remains in place
- legacy IDE controller registers (themselves based on earlier Western Digital MFM and ESDI
controllers) are still in place (although the cable might be serial ATA)
- legacy BIOS emulation layer to allow DOS-type OS's and utilities run on legacy-free machines
Don't get me wrong, this is one of many possible steps in the right direction. But none of these steps are particularly new or innovative. Heck, look at the way EISA 80x86 config utilities could run on DEC Alphas that didn't have an 80x86 in them, *that* was innovative (although again in a legacy-compatible way).Why is legacy a bad thing? (Score:5, Insightful)
Our medical profession uses techniques that are centuries old. Why? Because they work.
Merely because something is old does not mean it's bad. My old external modem still works and is as fast as any USB modem. How am I harmed by using this "legacy" technology for faxing? How is my computer slower?!
There are times when old technology should be replaced by new technology. But, merely because it's old does not mean it's bad. We shouldn't be upgrading simply for the sake of it.
What used to be called "time tested" is now called "legacy". We live in a disposable culture where if it's a couple years old, it's worthless. No wonder our music sucks. It took the Beatles, the Stones, and the Who years before they make their best works.
How about this quote? (Score:2, Insightful)
<sarcasm> Yes, because we all know that new technology is automatically more reliable, smaller, less expensive and easier to manufacture/maintain. </sarcasm>
Reading through it more I see that what he
EFI is in ROM. (Score:3, Informative)
This is a Good Thing. It let me edit the lilo.conf when I had an otherwise unworking IA64 Linux box...
No Serial Console? (Score:2)
Use a high-speed video camera (Score:2)
Actually, having done Linux driver development, I agree. Developers need RS-232 debug, whether for Linux or Wind Bag.
The legacy part that bothers me... (Score:5, Insightful)
I want a saner interrupt system. We're still using the same 16 interrupts they introduced with the PC-AT, with a little bit of PnP gloss over them. And most systems seem to have certain IRQs reserved away for their respective devices, so you can't use them-- don't have a floppy drive? Well, it'd be nice to let the PnP stuff use that IRQ for something else, but on many systems, you can't. And in a world where ever processor has a math-coprocessor _built in_, what's the point of reserving IRQ 13 for it? (Yes, the current design of Pentiums and Athlons require it. But _why_?)
Building a completely legacy free PC is pretty unlikely at this juncture, because the underlying architecture simply hasn't changed...
-JDF
Re:The legacy part that bothers me... (Score:3, Informative)
Summary (Score:2)
Serial, parallel, PS/2 (keyboard/mouse) ports are being replaced by USB.
Internal busses are moving from parallel to serial. While moving fewer bits at a time, they don't have to synchronize between the lines, so the overall speed is much higher. Hence, ATA->Serial ATA and PCI->PCI Express.
The traditional BIOS is being rethought.
Legacy Free (Score:5, Funny)
Who would buy a computer without a keyboard?
Re:Legacy Free (Score:3, Interesting)
I have four of 'em [palm.com].
--
OpenFirmware compatible (Score:5, Interesting)
Legacy Free == Backwards Compatible? (Score:2, Interesting)
the article is an Intel ad (Score:2)
What about PCBs? (Score:3, Funny)
power? (Score:2)
A trojan for DRM (Score:5, Insightful)
During the last months, whenever news about Palladium or any other DRM system that required hardware support appeared, a common answer was: "so what? As long as we have our legacy motherboards, HDs, etc., we'll be fine. They can't force us to buy new DRM-enabled hardware".
Well, now they can.
Imagine that Microsoft decides that their next version of Windows requires hardware support from this new EFI standard that Intel is pushing. And imagine that EFI carries with it a DRM system.
And what if you are using Linux? Oh yes, it will certainly boot in a new EFI PC. As long as the developers sign a NDA.
Basically, the entertainment industry has an interest in seeing all the PCs obsolete and replaced with DRM-enabled hardware, and this "revolution" is their golden chance. Not that replacing obsolete technology isn't a bad thing, but I'd be very wary of anything "they" try to sell us under the cover of being "innovative, cheaper, efficient, modern"... (have you read the first page of the article? It sounds like a hype piece from Intel itself).
Re:A trojan for DRM (Score:3, Informative)
Oh, you did know that, right? You can download ELILO straight off Intel's EFI section [intel.com]. (An observant reader will notice that it's actually hosted by HP's research lab [hp.com], although I can't actually find the info there.)
Of course, you can also read about EFI and Linux from RedHat [redhat.com].
I wouldn't worry, somehow. Plus EFI is mostly used with the new Itanium architecture. I'm sure Linux will be able to survive the impending DRM apocolypse.
Alas, everyone wants backwards compatibility (Score:5, Interesting)
Shhh.. Just listen (Score:3, Insightful)
Honestly though, this dumb question really has an underlying insight with the reason I run older hardware and everyone runs hardware that has geneology in legacy systems. It might not be the most efficient way to do things but it sure is the easiest and safest.
Take the obvious example cars. 100 and some odd years ago someone found a good way of putting a car together. Everyone took that concept and decided to build upon it. We could have started all over again, but that would have no guarentee of them being any good.
It may be better to build cars in the shape of a doughnut out of space age polymers. But I'll never know because I won't be the one driving them when the first batch of them explodes and kills everyone inside. I'll wait 5 years until they become tested legacy technology cars.
That legacy-free PC... (Score:4, Funny)
If you cant' get to the article, (Score:5, Funny)
GMFTatsujin
Key point of the article (Score:5, Insightful)
Just like this says, this is about the computer industry - not about the users, the businesses that rely on computers or the businesses that develop software. It's about those who sell new systems.
Hell, what commodity industry wouldn't like to see the current technology stack thrown out the window every 20 years ? The perhaps largest change we see in consumer technology today is the current TV systems being replaced with HDTV. That too is driven by the industry, but has only become possible with the emergence of cheap DVD technologies and crappification of cinema theaters that makes the home experience better than the cinema experience. Consumers now feel that HDTV will give them a meaningful upgrade.
I doubt that very few home users feel that the 20 year old legacy is a problem. In fact, most users realize that there is little need to upgrade the core of the computer any longer, since performance for their basics needs isn't improved with new hardware (gamers excluded).
I like BIOS (Score:4, Interesting)
cases (Score:3, Interesting)
Gone are the days of cases made of
Legacy hardware = bad, legacy software = good (Score:3, Insightful)
Hardware has gotten better over the last 20 years
Software hasn't
I'm not kidding, folks. Hardware has obvoulsly gotten better - faster, more reliable, cheaper, simpler to interconnect and configure. The hardware available to research labs is at most one generation ahead of what's sold to the masses.
On the software front, though, remarkably little has changed in the last twenty+ years, except for stuff moving from research labs out to the real world, and consolidation behind the Microsoft "standard". How much difference is there, fundamentally, between an Alto [slashdot.org] running Smalltalk and a PC running XP (other than hackability and stability, of course)? The major difference is that the Alto could only interact with the small community of other Altos, whereas the XP box can hang out with the much larger community of PCs.
So what? Why do people do it? (Score:3, Insightful)
not being able to
a) use my laptop as serial console (it has no serial
port any more)
b) switch my IBM "clickety-click" keyboard on my
laptop (it has no PS/2 port any more - only
two USB, one VGA and one parallel)
is icky. I heavily dislike it. My IBM keyboard
weighs about six kilopond, but that's what makes
it good.
OTOH, think about all the "small" OSes, i.e.
non-Windows and non-GNU/Linux.
Will they ever work on those computers?
Also, since the design changes, you can never
know if TCPA is already inside.
I hope I can shed some light on it, and I'm
just trying to tell people to not forget their
own past.
I still like MS GW-BASIC 3.22 - I was 8 when
I learned it (and did not even understand a
single word of English; I started to learn
English at the age of 12).
As usual, PC people ignore Apple (Score:3, Insightful)
Legacy-free computing? Apple's way ahead, as usual (Score:5, Interesting)
I've been running a legacy-free computer since 1987 when I bought my first Mac.
See a trend here? Seems the x86 world is just now getting around to solving legacy issues that Apple solved long ago. Welcome to the future, folks.
Being paranoid again... (Score:4, Insightful)
First, consider this; All the peripherals mentioned -- ISA slots (which, admittedly, I wouldn't mind seeing go away), serial ports, parallel ports, keyboard-and-mouse ports -- are all dirt cheap, and dead easy to implement. The technology to do so has been around for decades. It is proven, it's stable, and it's all (as others have pointed out) add-ons. Having add-ons does NOTHING that I can see to inhibit the "evolution" of the core microprocessor and support logic.
UNLESS, that is, you're Microsoft or Hollywood. Consider all the noise in recent years about digital copyrights, copy protection, ad nauseum. Consider the vast array of add-ons Out There that let consumers burn CDs, DVDs, make tape backups, etc., adding to Jack Valenti and Hilary Rosen's ongoing nightmares. Consider further that Microsoft is one of several companies in a partnership that dictates PC hardware standards.
Now, how do you wrest control away from the computer consumer, in a slow and insidious fashion, so they won't even guess what's happening until its too late? In other words, how do you turn those pesky general-purpose PCs into something that will still do everything Joe or Jane SixPack will want it to, but that exerts all kinds of copy controls and limitations when you hook one of those annoying CD or DVD burners to it?
Why, that's easy. Disguise the removal of those annoyingly versatile, general-purpose, and (most importantly) difficult-to-copy-control features like serial, parallel, SCSI, and others as moving towards "legacy-free" systems!
What's more, let's remake the operating system so that add-on peripherals have to be blessed by Microsoft in order to even run with Windows, today and more than ever in the future! Sure! Just let Uncle Steve, Uncle Bill, and the RIAA/MPAA take care of EVERYTHING, and you won't ever have to worry about violating copyrights, or learning ANYthing more about computers than where the "On" switch is, ever again. Trust us, we know what's best for You!
Consider that, in the not-too-distant future, might we see a "PC" that has NO expansion slots? Just Redmond and Hollywood-approved "ports?"
Yes, I probably am letting my paranoid side run rampant again. However, as I said in another post; If the consumer crowd wants to let themselves be led around by the nose, fine. That's their privilege. All I ask is don't force this "Legacy-Free!" crap down the throats of those of us who don't need it, don't want it, and can't possibly make use of it for our applications.
Fred Langa is an Intel playboy (Score:3, Insightful)
For instance, examine the following paragraph from the article:
Okay, so what is a BIOS? BIOS stands for Basic Input/Output System. It has (limited) drivers for interfacing to the hardware, and a user interface. In essence, it is an operating system to the same degree as DOS; DOS hands control of the machine to a single program, and will never get it back unless that program makes interrupt calls. This is why x86 assembler on some flavor of DOS is still one of the most popular platform for "embedded" and "industrial" systems, mostly for machine control and the like. Automotive smog test systems are almost always PCs. Color matching systems, likewise.
So the BIOS is already an OS, it is secure, and furthermore I have seen BIOS entirely in flash ROM which has a GUI, optionally mouse-driven interface. (A basic mouse driver is trivial to write, especially if all you support is PS/2 mice, which all use the same protocol.) Doing USB and whatnot is much more difficult and your flash might actually have to be, like, a couple megabytes in size rather than the usual 512kB or 1MB.
Furthermore the crap intel is proposing runs on the hard drive. This is a big reason why Compaq machines are such a pain in the ass as it is; Many of them don't have a normal PC BIOS with a configuration tool in them (though my Compaq Presario 1692 Laptop does) and you have to use the stuff on the hard drive. This means (for those of you who are a little slow on the uptake) that if you don't have a working hard drive connected, you cannot configure the system.
As for the "limited, arcane, and text-only" BIOS screens; There are BIOSes with built in help, like pretty much all of them these days. Most of the help isn't filled in, for whatever reason. Also, it's always arcane, there is quite simply no way around that, because computer hardware is complicated! Memory has timings for latency, for example. The SPD ((E)E)PROM will solve that problem for you but ram without it is cheaper...
Let's see, what else can I pick apart in his article?
Actually, the reason USB never took off is because all early implementations of USB have terrible latency and don't even begin to approach their supposed peak bandwidth. Newer systems still don't get it right; Games which are highly CPU-dependent (like Unreal and its descendants) will cause your mouse input to choke, and sometimes even caused missed keypresses. On MODERN implementations! This is unacceptable. USB is better technology than AT keyboards (After all, PS/2 is the same as AT, with a different plug) and PS/2 mice (which are just serial ports at a lower voltage, 5V rather than 12V IIRC) but so much effort has been expended on making those lega
I don't want no steenkin' USB mouse... (Score:3, Insightful)
I definetly don't want my mouse and keyboard gettin' the hickups in midst of a fast multiplayer hackfest. And be it only for a split second.
I tried USB once, cause I kinda like the idea of hotplugging (I use my printer via USB and it's a breeze), but it just doesn't cut it for signal intensive input devices. No fscking way are serious gamers going to switch to non-legacy mice any time soon.
Since this guy is jacking of on USB, EFI and whatnot of Intel stuff and goes on bullshitting about how legacy is slowing down PC evolution 'cause people don't buy USB mice (who and what gave him that idea???) I have a hard time taking him for granted. He's most certainly a payed-off Intel advocate.
Is this really a Good Idea (TM)? (Score:4, Interesting)
For example, abandoning the ISA standard in favor of PCI was overall a good, if a bit late (and contrived, with VESA and EISA, etc), development. Although I regretted losing a few good expansion cards, there was really not much lost beyond sentimental value.
PCI is showing its age, and the transition to PCI-Express (or whatever name it ends up having) will be welcome.
Serial ATA, once it's mature, will be also a welcome change. No need for those big cables in the case, at least.
I've been operating without a floppy disk drive for years now, with only minor inconveniences whenever some BIOS update, old DOS driver or utility demands a "boot disk" the old-fashioned way. There's no reason to assume it's there anymore, and it's a useless expense in both money and space.
Those are good changes. But this is not always the case.
Case 1: Legacy Ports
No more PS/2 ports, no more serial ports? USB and Firewire all the way!!
Sure, sounds great if it works. Except that it almost never does.
USB support in PCs is "decent" now, but it's not 100% reliable, and one can't afford to be left with no input device because the BIOS/OS/random-thing-I-don't-know-of has problems with USB today.
My current PC has a bunch of unused USB ports, but I'm still sticking to PS/2 mouse and keyboards. The reason is that every week or so someone calls me because they have a problem with their computer and it happens to be the USB mouse and/or keyboard which just stops working.
I reduced my "family technical support" calls by 50% just by putting a USB->Serial adapter on my father's keyboards and mouses.
I have the same problem one or twice a month with almost all USB devices I use: printers, cameras, etc. I use USB for them because they need the bandwidth, and because I can afford to tinker with them every so often.
Sometimes all it requires is plugging and unplugging. Sometimes turning the device on or off (printers and wireless devices). Sometimes rebooting the machine. Sometimes it just starts working again without a clear cause. It rarely takes more than 2 minutes, so it's not a problem (if you have a traditional mouse/keyboard with you).
This doesn't apply to basic input devices:
I don't need MB/s of bandwidth to type or move a cursor, and I certainly can't afford to lose my input devices because the USB controller, or BIOS, or the OS, or whatever causes the problem had a bad hair day. Particularly because it can take more than 2 minutes to fix when you have no input devices to figure what's going on.
On the other hand, if my PS/2 keyboard stops responding, I know it's a hardware issue. Replace keyboard, or, at worst, replace port.
This is just within the Windows world. I had enough trouble getting USB support working in a few Linux installations not to bother trying anymore, as I haven't really needed to.
Maybe it works flawlessly and automatically from some distributions now, but I wouldn't risk anything going wrong there.
Basic I/O has to work flawlessly, and in PCs, even in brand-new machines, I just don't trust USB that much. Maybe it's precisely because of the legacy support, I don't know, but I think it's been long enough for BIOS/OSes/etc to get it right.
Case 2: Legacy BIOS
They want to make the BIOS an OS? What happened to small and simple?
I guess having it programmed in C would be an advantage, and I'm sure there are technical limitations with the current BIOS technology that could use an update, but I'm worried about this approach.
If you need an OS, that's what the OS is for. If you need diagnostic utilities et al, get an OS and run diagnostic utilities on it.
Why do you need to put this in the firmware layer? Firmware should be small and stable. If something fails in firmware, you're normally in deep trouble.
A BIOS is not something
nice touch (Score:3, Funny)
And Windows will be so much better without DOS (Score:3, Interesting)
Today's computers have almost nothing in them that was available 2 years ago no less twenty. The core of a computer is the north bridge chipset. This is where most of the speed is determined and most of the cost comes from. This is where we have DDR Ram, 533 MHz Front side busses, and AGP 8x. Nothing here remotely resembles a PC from 20 years ago. Sure, computers still have a version of the keyboard port they used 20 years ago. We still use it because it's really good at being a keyboard port.
The PCI section was funny. In one breath the article said that PCI express is an evolution from PCI that is invisible to software. The quote was: "mainly a hardware change that will result in simpler motherboard and peripheral designs". Then 5 lines down the article said that when PCI Express is adopted "a whole new class of PC will emerge." Yea, and that class will be slightly different than the class before just like always.
As far as the claims that the hard drive attachment technology hasn't changed much in the last 20 years it's very hard to find anything in modern IDE that existed back in the PC. The physical signaling is very different, the controller is on the drive now, there is a protocol (ATA) running on top of the bus, the addressing has completely changed. Iâ(TM)d say the biggest change with IDE came back around 1993 when ATA was developed to run on top of it. I am a great fan of SerialATA but it is just an evolutionary change in the physical communications layer. That's one of the best things about it, that it is compatible with the "legacy" architecture and yet the article raves about it and then laughably backes it up by saying that the first serial ATA drive out was "quieter and cooler-running than its classic ATA counterparts" Pure fluff.
As for the floppy, it is certainly time for something to be done about it and yet next to no work has been done on a replacement. The floppy disk is a random read-write bootable removable medium that every PC operating system natively supports. There is no other device that can claim that. CD Burners should have replaced the floppy years ago but the manufacturers never got together and built a new standardized low-level interface. Even bootable CD's still emulate a floppy disk and the boot image is limited to the size of a 2.88 MB floppy. The floppy replacement is an issue that now *needs* to be addressed and yet the articleâ(TM)s suggestion is to simply leave it out without anything to replace it's unique functionality.
Every once in a while these fluff articles pop up. "Soon computers will be as simple, cheap and as easy to use as your phone" they spout "and all they need to do is leave out all that old stuff that you don't really need". The thing they seem to miss is that it has already happened. You can go down to the store and buy a nice legacy-free computer with none of those useless 20 year old keyboard ports or dumb serial ports and it's cheap and easy to use and it's a palm pilot and it sucks for doing what computers are good at. There are all kinds of "legacy-free" computers out there, Ipaq, Tivo, smart phones, there's even those super-cool 3com Audreyâ(TM)s that are all the rage because they are legacy-free
Legacy free usually means not compatible with the old stuff and for a computer that means it's less flexible and thus less powerfull and less desirable. There is a *huge* amount of effort that has gone into designing and supporting these "legacy" systems and to suggest that because it's old it should go is to forget a fundamental truth in the PC industry:
Re:You could get a legacy-free PC before (Score:2, Funny)
(I know, I know, I got reeled in, but I can never resist Mac trolls.)
Re:Fred has always been a bit of a PHB... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Legacy (Score:5, Funny)
Easy. Throw out serial or ps/2 dildo. Replace with firewire or usb dildo.