And just how long has EFI been out for by this point? It's been well over five years, but nobody other than Apple (after they dumped PowerPC and Open Firmware five years ago) seems to bother with it.

As much as I want to see it happen, I haven't exactly seen Gigabyte, Asus, MSI, etc. doubling down on EFI for all their recent motherboards, even if some of them have dabbled in it a little.

Ah yes, RAS syndrome

Actually the phrase "GOG games" isn't redundant at all, since "Good Old Games games" (or, to put it differently, "games from Good Old Games") is precisely the expansion that is intended.

Indeed, but the limitations are beginning to become more problematic. Not just the boot time and the fact that the BIOS doesn't seem to actually be able to detect anything, but things like where you can put an OS on the disk as well. With 1tb disks not that hard to get, there's really no reason why one should be restricted as to where one puts the OS and how many OSes one puts on the disk. Really, there's no reason why one shouldn't be able to put on 8 or so OSes if one chooses.

Of course there probably isn't any good reason to install that many OSes, but hey, one ought to be able to.

But, if this turns out anything like ACPI, the hardware vendors will cheap out and not even bother to make sure their code conforms to spec and MS will allow it because they seem to like enabling poor design decisions and the rest of us suffer for it.

Hey, what is your avatar of? It looks familiar.

This is my primary concern with UEFI going mainstream. Some traditional BIOS implementations have already been hiding or outright removing certain functionality, and there is the potential to lose even more with UEFI.

There's also the harsh reality that this may not make too much of a difference: a large portion of PC startup time is caused by the OS itself, and once you're past the first stage UEFI or BIOS won't make a difference.

Nooo I miss tweaking every bit of crap my computer promised to offer but didn't so I had to hack it myself!

So it lets you change a fucking something?
Bios is especially important for smart phones in my opinion. Because I love hacking smart phones.

Do they typically have a BIOS? When I haxxored my Nexus One, the boot menu there was much more similar to what I've seen in EFI than a BIOS.

Except, when I asked "Will my GOG run with this?", I meant ALL my GOG, not only my GOG GOG.

Yes, I like hacking phones and such but I don't think this falls under smartphone category.

It's an old children's TV stop-motion show by Cosgrove-Hall Studios in Greater Manchester.

He's Chorlton the Happiness Dragon, in Wheelie World. The show was made in the late 1970s and is called "Chorlton and the Wheelies". He's a gormless sod, but it was a great show.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkgEi84vAOo
Fenella the witch <3
^_^

ohh that's pretty cool, I haven't heard of that show before.
Stop motion is the best :D

Kinda sucks though that kid's shows can be harder to find than regular shows.
I prefer cartoons and lighthearted shows, even if they're generally for younger audiences.

Windows, maybe. My SSD-based Ubuntu HTPC spends at least a third of its startup time in the BIOS before it starts booting the OS, and even the netbook with its crappy laptop drive is probably spending 20% of the time in the BIOS.

And with the HTPC that's from pressing the power button to being logged in with xbmc up and running, not from pressing the power button to getting to the Windows login screen from which you have to wait two minutes for all the other garbage to load after you log in.

With non-Windows boot times getting close to BIOS startup times, having a faster BIOS is potentially a major win.

Err, wrong grammar....