mf - story #4809 - Why Closed-Source BIOSes Suck Reason #125938

Why Closed-Source BIOSes Suck Reason #125938
posted by dennisn on December 2nd, 2008 at 5:58PM

Reason 125937 was the stupidity of demanding a video card, which is absolutely non-essential, before granting you the privilege of booting into your own hard-earned machine. Defective by design, it cannot be simply patched to Just Work.

Reason 125938 is the stupidity of not being allowed to boot off of an SD card, even though USB cards work fine, and they're pretty much the exact same thing. Open bioses, like that in the olpc obviously support this, but stupid evil closed-source ones don't.

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I want
posted by pasofol on December 9th, 2008 at 2:45PM

might buy a acer one. It has sd slot if not two of them but requires a usb stick if i want to boot from other source to change os.

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posted by dennisn on December 9th, 2008 at 3:01PM

Specs look decent... olpc's ~500MHz cpu just isn't enough. (And/Or firefox is horribly programmed.) Though, in fairness, this was probably an intentional tradeoff for battery life. The Aspire One has the typical "3 hour" rating (read: 1.5 actual hours), while the olpc has at least 8h (of real usage), and maybe 16h of static ebook-reading-type usage.

The olpc, though, has a waay better BIOS--which allows you to do whatever the fuck you want. Including booting off SD cards, or playing pong straight off the bios without booting! :P. Olpc also has awesome wifi and meshing capability. Though it is still too slow, writing to the "solid-state" disk takes too long, and it's crappy tiny rubber keyboard is just useless.

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