I get that all the time at work. Got it yesterday from one of my fellow System Administrators. Since people don’t use floppys anymore, its not the first thing they think of. A lot of people have thier machine under their desk, so they don’t hear or see it.
More than likely for backward compatability. You start screwing with the bios, and all sorts of poorly written crap runs even poorer.
Because he made a fortune by bastardizing and stealing other peoples ideas, then driving them out of business. I however am thankfull for Microsoft. If it wasn’t for thier buggy OS and Apps, I wouldn’t be able to make my house payments. As long as they have the monopoly, I am assured of having a job fixing thier crap.
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Well, I’m glad you think so, 'cause we sure don’t. “Mom,” we tell her patiently, “nothing’s gonna happen. Computers don’t explode anymore, they fixed that.”
[sub]…um, it’s probably not a good thing that the reason I didn’t hear Drive A whirring is because the hard drive’s fan makes so much noise, huh?[/sub]
I wonder why they don’t make the HDD boot first by default. You’d think that if someone knew enough about computers to use a boot disk, they’d also know that the settings could easily be changed in the CMOS setup.
As far as Bill Gates goes …
Well, at least he paid for DOS! Steve Jobs and his cronies pretty much walked into XEROX’s labs and stole the code for their GUI OS!
Also, I’m pretty sure that the real antichrist wouldn’t start a $17 billion charity.
Hmm, somebody in another thread that I just read stated that Apple gave XEROX $1 million in stock options for the OS. I’m going to assume whoever said that was right and my teacher was misinformed (as is usually the case) and correct myself here and now before anyone else gets a chance.
Oh, BTW, y’all may want to check out this wonderfully written and quite insightful piece that I found whilst aimlessly surfing one day, entitled Why I Hate Microsoft. Makes a great read.
I didn’t know there were such people, Ned. It tells you the button to push to get into the BIOS (usually del or f2 or something) when your computer is booting. Once in, it’s a simple matter of finding the entry titled “Boot Sequence.”
I think that using the tools on a start up disk (from a command prompt, no less) would be far more challenging to the average user than the compartively trivial act of changing one little setting.
Hmmm. I hadn’t entirely read that link I posted until now. Took me over 2 hours to read the whole thing. I have to say that I now agree 100% with DDG. Bill Gates is evil incarnate! Charity or no charity, a quick read through of that link will chill the blood of even the most ardent MS supporter. Hell, it should be required reading for anyone who wants to buy a computer.
I prefer the floppy to be the first boot device, the CD-Rom the second, and then the hard drive. Floppy for dos based virus scan, or minor command line stuff, cd for repair on Win2k.
He paid for a DOS that was basically a hacked version of CPM stolen from Digital Research. At the time piracy laws were pretty well non existant, I seem to remember Gates saying in an interview that with the laws today he wouldn’t have been able to get away with it. (I don’t have a cite for this, I read it in some treeware publication a few years back…I could be mistaken).
I really wish I was. I had a lot of fun with it though. He was looking at his screen despairingly, I looked over at the screen, kicked the floppy eject button with my foot, and turned around and went back to what I was doing, laughing the whole time.
Would it be altogether TOO DAMN HARD for the computer to check the floppy disk, determine it’s not bootable, and then TRY THE HARD DRIVE NEXT? instead of screeching to a halt? Or has the concept of IF…THEN…ELSE failed them?
Um, I would hate to turn this into another PC vs. Mac thread, but it must be pointed out that Macs, in the days when they actually used floppies, did just this.
It’s been a few years, but as I recall, it’s not the BIOS or the operating system (at least not a core part of the operating system) that is the source of this message, it’s (get ready for this) the FORMAT routine.
The message is actually placed in the boot sectors of the diskette (along with a bit of code to display it) by the routine that formats the diskette. When you make a diskette bootable, that stuff gets replaced with the code needed to actually boot.
I’ve seen utility products that replace the standard DOS FORMAT, and (among other things) put a more informative message on the diskette. The old Central Point Software PC Tools software did this.
So if you want to complain to someone about the vagueness of that message, you’ll need to talk to whoever wrote the FORMAT routine, or call the diskette manufactures who are pre-formatting your diskettes, and putting that message on them.
