On Sun, 2005-04-03 at 09:32 +0800, Paul Kitchener wrote: > Its also stands for Hardware Abstraction Layer in windoze which is about > as helpful as it's namesake. > > For instance if you changed your hard drive and your graphics card you > may not be able to boot your pc anymore, at that point your penny should > really be dropping;)
You'll find that works *much* better on NT-based systems (NT4, 2k, XP) than 9x. It should work reliably unless you have broken drivers from a vendor. I've certainly never had a problem with it. I'm not exactly a Windows fan, but really ... bagging Windows in general for win95/98 hardware portability problems is about as reasonable these days as bagging MacOS in general because MacOS 9 lacked protected memory support. > Apple makes a mockery of such a setup: I once simply copied the OS9 > system folder from a B&W G3 to a G4 iBook which only had OSX and hey presto! That's rather handy. Too bad recent Macs' firmware won't boot OS9 :-( > I know OSX wouldnt do that as well, but I still think it makes "them" > look bad;) Frankly, if it doesn't handle that well then Apple broke BSD. BSD systems have generally handled unexpected hardware transplants extremely well, as has Linux (some commercial UNIXes do to IIRC). It seems reasonable to expect OS/X to do the same (and I do recall people mentioning that it does in fact handle it pretty well). -- Craig Ringer
