[GTALUG] MP BIOS Toshiba - semi revival

[R Russell Reiter]

<snip>
>Recompiling serves no purpose.  Do 

I consider  security in mission critical environments to be a valid purpose and note that enterprise is not necessarily mission critical whereas national security is uniformly considered to be very critical.

>Useful uses of modern technology is to make things faster or more power
>efficient so they can run longer.
  
This is an enterprise point of view.  It has validity in its own niche. There are other critical niches which have different aims and security needs. Fire control systems for example.

Lap tops with 10 to 15 hour battery
>lives exist now. 

LI technology has improved in the last ten years and its true those improvements were drive by markets rather than government or national interests but those interests can and will take advantage of those improvements.

Let me put it this way, would you deliberately not take advantage of a secure booting feature which  because of hardware and software improvements, works with little or no added overhead? 

You could do that as a matter of personal preference but in enterprise you would lose market share when your bank clients discover your system is not as secure as your competitors.

>I think source distributions like gentoo are stupid, but at least they
>only compile things once.  They aren't that crazy.  

So you only compile your critical dependency system once at runtime and if and when you make hardware or other critical changes you do it again. There are valid reasons to harden systems and keep them hard. You got 82000 hrs spin time from one of your drives, that's a lot of times between boots.

I don't just pull this stuff out from under my hat you know, I do a lot of reading. Its just that I'm limited to the stuff that's not above my pay grade or not otherwise trade secrets.



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Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.