Intel says the PC BIOS will be replaced with 'EFI'

[Bayard R. Coolidge]

Paul Lussier, pll at lanminds.com said:

 >>>One of the nice things about working with Sun hardware was that if there
 >>> was a problem with the OS, it was always trivial to go into the EEPROM
 >>> and change the configuration to boot off of a different device without
 >>> having to later reboot and change back later.

Yeah, we had something like that on the Alpha console, too - you could 
either manually
specify any (supported) device that was available, and then set one of 
them to be the
default as well. We could/can also set up stuff like auto-reboot on 
power failure (or not),
as well as doing network boots for remote software installation and 
other stuff. I don't
want to get into a contest as to who had what when, but it's fairly 
obvious that Intel's
paradigm is finally providing functionality that was available on other 
vendors' products
a good 10+ years ago... And, frankly, they didn't need to buy the Alpha 
technology to
learn of this capability, either. If they'd ever bought and used an 
Alpha system, I'd
think that some bright engineer would have figured out how to at least 
imitate it in
some fashion, and perhaps enhance it from there.

Bayard (who runs off of a dual AMD Athlon system, thankfully...)