(Spoilers below) I would like to note that after publishing the video I've spoken to one firmware engineer, and read about a dozen posts from another (Matthew Garrett), and my takeaway is: no, the SMM has _not_ been left alone as it should be, it _has_ been leveraged for a bunch of reprehensible hacks by vendors who didn't want to do things the right way. But nothing on this level that I'm aware of. When I said "corporate bullshit," I was referring to _what we see here,_ stuff in the vein of advertising, not solutions to some kind of genuine problem, and I don't _think_ the SMM's been abused for that. But honestly, at this point, nothing would shock me.
Cyrix abused SMM for VGA emulation in the MediaGX. It had only basic framebuffer 8bpp and 16bpp video support so the firmware watches for access to VGA memory and registers to emulate the 16 color planar modes and text mode. It was super slow and terrible.
When you were explaining how the operating system was in total control, in my head I was going ‘well _technically_ there's the negative rings but yeah, fair enough’. I honestly didn't get that you were foreshadowing, I was floored when you dropped your bombshell. I have to say, while what they did is wrong and should not be attempted in a production environment (even more so given the non-existant benefits), I have to say they habe earned my begrudging respect for the sheer overkill. Cobble together a half-assed hypervisor with insufficient hardware support just so you can flash a useless feature on the screen for a second? There should be an award for that.
doing shit that sounds like the way you'd design an NSA backdoor into something to make a calendar app load 10 seconds faster has been such a bizarre recurring theme of this series.
Your explanation at the end perfectly explains why every company remotely related to technology has shoved “AI” into their products: it’s the only thing they had left to add.
@@CathodeRayDudeI at least get the impression that the AI hype was more organic from the public thanks to the chatbot "demo" blowing their minds, but I suppose the huge investments in AI are coming from the hunt for the "next big thing". Funnily enough the perfect example of desperation for a differentiating feature was the "Next big thing is here" commercials Samsung ran in the early 2010s for the Galaxy S phones, so desperate to have something that could "make them better than the iPhone" when the only problems left to solver in smartphones were bigger/better/faster screen/storage/network/processor
And all the while phone manufacturers keep pushing new models with "AI" features baked in, I keep repeating myself: guys, it's just software. They COULD make that AI-crap run on every phone up to 10 years old, but they purposefully chose to make it arbitrarily exclusive to their latest model. They just can't think of anything to add anymore, because smartphones are "done". Any smartphone up to 5 years old, holds up perfectly well, except for the fact that it arbitrarily doesn't recieve updates anymore, while your banking app demands an Android version no more than 3 years old, for reasons nobody at bank can be arsed to explain properly.
@@thany3 yeah. my phone is going on 6 years old now. it does everything i need it to and then some. The only reason i have to get a new one is software updates and the degrading battery. Also, does anyone actually NEED this AI stuff? I mean, you can do cool stuff for sure with AI, but I don't need it shoved into everything like IoT and internet connectivity was shoved into everything a few years ago..
It's really funny that you're the first person to point this out, more than an hour after I release the video, because I expected to get a flood of comments about it since I completely missed it. Like, the cursedness of the whole thing was so immense that I completely failed to notice that it just exposes all of your email in two completely different ways - Quick look has no authentication, so anybody who presses that button can just read your shit, but even if you didn't have the whole laptop, you could just plug the hard drive in to a USB adapter and copy the XML files off from any old PC, with no special tools. This is perhaps the biggest honey pot for an evil maid attack that I have ever seen in my life, but because I couldn't imagine anybody actually using it in good faith, it never even occurred to me to contemplate the security implications if you actually did. I feel like that really tells so much of the story, this thing was so terrifying that it hid an even more obviously terrifying behavior in plain sight.
I mean, was BitLocker even a thing back then? And what's more, was it _used_? If not, then the NTFS partition would've been unencrypted as well, wouldn't it?
@@ondrikbI think Bitlocker was available for Vista and onwards, so around for that machine. For "was it used", well tbh I don't know. I would assume any half way competent enterprise IT would enable it but they would probably also throw this whole FAT32 Partition of that laptop
@@CathodeRayDude Well I mean, sure it was easy to access data for someone without computer skills... but back in the day there was no disk encryption (I think Bitlocker or Truecrypt where an option, but encryption was expensive), so you just needed a Linux live USB to boot the computer and see that data from the NTFS partition. If the computer had a password at all, of course, something that was not used back in the days (most computers back in the day didn't have that, it's only a recent thing that everything has to have a password, and still most user don't set it because you have to remember it). Also executives... they are usually the kind of persons that have their password written on a post-it attached to the monitor anyway.
Does QuickLook even have a password anyway? If not you can pretty much borrow your CEO's laptop and take a quick peek or even sneak an email, and it won't even leave a trace that the computer was used because it doesn't even boot an OS where the audit software would be! I wonder if specially crafted JPEGs would pwn that SMM atrocity like the recent LogoFail exploits.
The delta between the technical wizardry and tolerance for stupid, unneeded risk needed to pull off such a hack and the thing they used these things for is... stunning. It's like hacking the Pentagon to increase the default size of the mouse pointer. I love it.
That reminds me of a story Dave Plummer (Dave's Garage) (the guy who wrote Windows Task Manager) shared. The immigration officers heard he worked at Microsoft and were basically detaining him until they fixed his issue with Word. I'm definitely not giving the story justice.
HP DayStarter is kinda like changing the laws of the universe to make your kettle boil 10 seconds faster. A show of eldritch power harnessed for an innocuous and very pointless purpose.
It's the oft re-told tale of the aircraft carrier captain who calls in to have them change their heading so the sun doesn't come through the porthole while he's eating his morning bagel.
I do wonder if that is a true story or just something someone cooked up... It's so hilariously specific and petty that I have hard time imagining someone just making it up...@@cdigames
At least the aircraft carrier captain has some real power, sure they're using it for frivolous purposes *now*, but they could be using it to bomb a small nation out of existence (I never said it was a good sort of power, okay!). This is like someone stowed away aboard an aircraft carrier and modified the helm controls so they could interfere with them, simply so they could have a way to eat their breakfast without the sun in their eyes, because they didn't want the hassle of having to put up an umbrella.
@@Lyrainthevalley and then, 15 years later someone looks at the logs and see inexplicable course alterations every morning around 9.30-10.15 in the mornings (and maybe sometimes around supper time) and the museum ship curator finds a weird little cabin in a mostly inaccessible area with a porthole… 😅
@@Lyrainthevalley " good sort of power " Imagine the engineer on NVidia actually using the GPUs for ray-tracing of videogames, we could have cinema-like quality in videogames at 60 fps, instead of the AI bullshit. I hope that bubble pops, and raytracing becomes cheaper because all that hardware has to go somewhere (unlike the ASIC miners on the previous gold-rush, which are literally useless for anything else). The systolic array technology was made in 2010 for that purpose, it was never for the stupid linear algebra matrices of ReLU of a glorified auto-complete.
As someone that works at HP the whole rant about an executive firing everyone until they find someone that blurs out the worst idea possible, it's soooo true! hahahahahaha
In the civil service, we'd call it "new manager syndrome" basically any new executive that started had to do some incredible project to justify their pay packet, if you worked there long enough, you'd see the the same projects being rolled out by new managers every few years.
@@TheKumaDono it's the same reason one of the first thing's a lot of new managers do is layoff a bunch of people and clean house, gives a great impression to their bosses of making "hard decisions" no matter how useless it is
@@whatr0 Often, it's worse than useless since they're usually weakening the company in the process. It's akin to a man cutting off his leg to lose weight
"Looked like a BOX for a GeForce 4." My god, perfect, accurate description. What was it with early 2000s computer marketing design, like what a wild time.
I personally don't mind a bit of colour and flamboyance in box art, but some were indeed taking it a few steps too far. As for UEFI designs, I like to compare them to 2005-era websites, except in an alternate universe where dark mode was the norm, rather than light mode. Now it has to be said, UEFI interfaces are designed in Asia, mainly. Those countries have always produced the most, let's say, "traditional looking" websites, some even to this day. It should be no surprise that their affinity with website design in general translates to regular software design pretty much 1-to-1.
Here's my theory: HP was heavily involved in developing EFI to begin with (remember their sad and contractual devotion to the Itanium...) so they definitely knew how to mess with it. It's also quite possible that someone that worked on Windows 7 ended up at HP making the whole process a bit easier. So a couple of guys with the know how came up with this idea and installed it on their slow AF desktop that HP wouldn't replace to look at their schedule while they booted. Then some middle manager passed by, glanced at it, asked the guys about it, and despite the guys telling him that this was NOT SAFE he started a crusade to have this included in the next laptop to get a bonus. Tada!
Dang that rant is 🌶. Solid, and spoken in the language of tech, a dialect so rarely interested in delivering rants that aren't 100% capital-L Libertarian. Great writing!
Halfway through: "hah, this HP laptop is a silly hack!" At the end: "AND THAT'S WHY WE MUST DESTROY CAPITALISM! WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS!" Best tech video ever.
@Damaniel3 not sure if you're from the USA, but one of the people running for President wants to put a ten percent tariff on everything entering the USA including food. Fruits and vegetables that cannot be grown in our climate would be most affected and end up making it even harder to eat... but the country would profit by billions. 🙄 in other words, screw the poor, make the rich richer.
@@Damaniel3 Capitalism was the best solution (we knew of) to fix the problems of Feudalism and large scale pre-capitalist societies. It's just for some reason in the mid-20th century folks threw their hands up and said "We did it. We perfected economics. Nothing can ever get better" So things never do get better. And most of the societies that did try (Soviet Union, China, etc.) seemingly just came up with "Capitalism, but what if instead of Capitalists, its the Government" which doesn't change the structure/nature of the system, it just changes who benefits from it.
"Bob Needs A Bonus" should be the name of a recurring video series. Products that are defined or sold by one dumb feature that really didn't need to exist and has no real world benefit, but does anyways because, well, Bob Needs A Bonus. Or at the very least, make it a recurring phrase to describe such a thing.
The rant at the end was worth the whole watchtime. It reminded me of a rant Technology Connections made about toaster companies and why we can never expect innovative toasters ever again. Seems like the real boot-time-speedup was the executive bonuses we met along the way. Regarding the pop-up at 50:48, I'd love to see a video on what you think PCs could and should be.
Indeed, for all of HP's intents and purposes (namely getting a bullet point on a feature list that Dell doesn't have, and getting bonuses to middle management) these features probably worked amazingly. And agreed, I'd love to see that video as well, it's something I have some strong opinions on as well and I'd be very curious to hear more opinions on that :)
Oh god. I just paused the game I was playing when CRD said it was running on the SMM shouted out "NO!" and sat here for a moment in shock. I felt some tears starting to build from the horror.
I didn't expect a video about a calendar viewer to be such a roller coaster of emotions. At one moment we're looking at a cute little UEFI app and getting fascinated by some seemingly impossible computer wizardry and the next moment we're feeling resentment over how this wizardry was achieved before finally getting hit with the ennui of late stage capitalism.
Listening to your point about middle management unsolving problems while I was at work scanning copies of pen and paper quarterly count sheets so my manager can manually input them felt awfully prophetic.
When you mentioned the three power buttons that launch three separate OSs, my partner immediately said "one OS always tells the truth, another always tells lies..."
@@pocketpc_ I was expecting hypervisor shenanigans, or tasking one of the cores with updating the framebuffer until Windows takes over it, maybe a video overlay or just messing with the GOP driver until real drivers kick in. Or maybe it just override the splash screen of the BIOS as Windows really only displays the loading spinner on top. Or maybe it's a bootloader that adds 5 seconds to your boot time so you can see the calendar. Then he mentioned SMM and I froze at the horror. This thing loads user-provided JPEGs, so one can probably straight up gain control of SMM code. Yikes, that's like even worse than LogoFail in potential.
Been a while since I laughed as hard as when you said "SMM". Wonderful, a rootkit that displays a calendar. Nothing could ever possibly go wrong with this.
As someone who works in information security, and spent many years in firmware security with a focus in UEFI. I was screaming multiple times in this video. Somehow, HP did QuickLook right. Everything else? 😱 I should note - a UEFI NTFS driver is considered to be a sign of firmware-level infection. Firmware monitoring utilities will throw a holy fit if they see an NTFS driver in UEFI, it’s considered such a terrible idea. That’s one thing HP did right by keeping everything on FAT32. The other is signing the UEFI binary. Frighteningly, major motherboard vendors have had UEFI that doesn’t require signed executables as recently as 2021. (HP thankfully is not one of those.)
> Firmware monitoring utilities will throw a holy fit if they see an NTFS driver in UEFI, it’s considered such a terrible idea. Clearly not a bad idea enough for Apple, they have APFS & HFS drivers in EFI and an entire WiFi stack so you can download an OS restore image from the internet
@@unicodefox Apple uses their own custom hardened EFI. Network stacks including WiFi are normal though. An Apple’s APFS & HFS aren’t drivers in EFI, they’re in the boot loader.
UEFI NTFS drivers causing alarm is not so much because it's an inherently BAD idea and more because there's just not any reason to use one unless you're writing malware. 99.9% of the use case for UEFI is "launch setup_utility.efi or boot.efi on startup", neither of which requires NTFS support.
On the question of is EFI an operating system, I personally consider EFI to be an evolution of DOS - It's a single-tasking, complete-access-to-the-hardware OS that's cooked into the hardware. For fun, grab yourself an EFI Shell application. The 'map' command will show you the recognized filesystems. They're accessed with DOS-like notation - FS0: for the first filesystem, FS1: for the second filesystem, etc. dir to show the contents. cd \ or cd\[whatever] to change working directory. EFI is very DOS-like, albeit much more fully developed and functional for modern systems and requirements.
@@jedixo My understanding that it's more of a shell thing, because internally disks are identified by UIDs, but for something like shell using UIDs is very inconvenient. I'd say it's actually closer to Windows in that regard.
@@daemonspudguy I'd count it as one, because it is a platform made by Intel to run Windows. Now, whether it actually went trough with that is another question.
About that rant: I sometimes say the same thing about software. Especially software that's been around for a long time, like MS Office. It's just done. It was done 15 years ago. There is no feature that you could reasonably want from an office suite, that wasn't in MS Office 15 years ago. It's just done, complete, finished. All they had to do, is release security patches, bugfixes, maybe some packs with effects and such, and improve compatibility with newer Windowses. The only reason you might be using a laterly built feature, is because either Microsoft or your boss is telling you to. Something like cloud storage. This could easily have been an addon to Office XP.
actually i think the biggest improvement that i found when i used the free online version is that it now also suggest how to build your sentence structure using the same principals as chat-gpt. so auto correct now can work on a whole sentence and detect if you maybe wrote something weird. but yeah, other then that there is not a lot you could do with word or something. i don't know what plugins can do, but adding new media types in power point is something i can see as useful.
Office 97 is running perfectly fine on Windows XP SP3 in a virtual machine in 2024, and it is so much faster than Office 2019, and Access97 is so much less buggy than Access2019. I cannot be the only one using it today.
The only legitimate improvement I found was the .-x extension files that Office '07 and later spit up take up less space than equivalent pre-Office 2003 file formats. And the search prompt in Office 2016, the only reason I would use modern Office. However, with LibreOffice I still get what I need done and I don't really miss the search prompt (I don't even know if LO has it)
I actually make extensive use of new Excel features; Power Query and array functions are life-changing for a full-time spreadsheet jockey. Everything else was perfected in Office 2007 at the latest, Word and PowerPoint especially.
UEFI was already available as a thing by 2003 for the x86 platform, but at that point it was universally only used by server systems. If HP had switched their laptops to UEFI then, and implemented QuickLook at the time of the first Centrino CPUs, this would have been amazing. But as you said, by 2010, it was nearly unnecessary.
QuickLook did exist back then, but it loaded from Compact Flash or SD Cards on a few supported devices (TC1000, TC1100). I've examined the files and I have no idea how it's actually booting, but it does load in under 10 seconds to a UI that is powered by some very stripped down HTML/JS renderer. It doesn't support data entry at all, but it does let you view custom HTML pages you create and add to the QLook/Custom folder on the card. The copyright does claim it's partly the work of Phoenix, which is also the BIOS used on those tablet PCs.
Not only that, but It would be amazing if any of the Linux of that time used SystemD instead of the utterly slow SysV stupid interpreted single-threaded scripts. Linux was really, really bad, its easy to dunk on Windows, but Windows 7 boot was really, really fast, they really fixed their crap after WindowsXP/Vista fiasco. But by that time Linux also got way better too, really Linux was awful before 2004.
Industrial Design undergrad here: You have simultaneously summed up all my grimmest takeaways from the consumer electronics industry and given a face to all the malaise. Wrestling with questions like "Where can we actually improve here?" keeps me up on the best of days. The answer is almost always: "We already arrived at the ideal solution decades ago and cut off all the corners since." Endlessly frustrating, depressing, yet invigorating (for me) to actually advocate for individual expression and tailored solutions, broad appeal and maximized efficiency be damned. You have an uncanny knack for getting to the bottom of problems in modern product design and putting my curriculum to shame. New designers entering fields with no experience and no historical context don't make better designs, they make hastily thrown-together retreads that lack endurance and sacrifice good, tried-and-true features for trends for trends' sake AND wacky garbage that blindly breaks good convention for no good reason. Sincerely, thank you for singlehandedly dismantling my entire career choice.
I'm sending the last 10 minutes to everyone who asks me why I'm so grumpy about tech because you just articulated what I've been trying to say for like 5 years.
Me and a friend did it in trade school to see if we could trick the teacher into thinking we got a pre release of windows 2000 (we didn't even know 2k was coming out, we just made it up).
This is probably my favorite episode of Quick Start yet, and that rant at the end had me screaming at my computer with joy that finally someone understands my exact struggles with living in today's technological climate. Thoroughly amazing from start to finish, bravo!
amazing video! I absolutely love the whole "digging closer to hell" vibe that the bit about permission rings gets into, you've got an *incredibly* evocative way of writing / talking about the closer-to-metal aspects of modern computing!
Everything you're saying about Bob Needs A Bonus Logic (tm) I 100% agree with, but the one thing I'm certain of from watching this series is that all the engineers tasked with making these ridiculous things to get Bob his bonus, very likely took up the challenge and tried their damndest to make the best thing they could with the ridiculous limitations placed upon them. If anything, because of the stagnant nature of the PC industry, I bet some of these engineers were even excited to be tasked with coming up with an out of the box idea, even if it was frequently a security hole you could drive a road train through. Every one of these, I've looked at them and gone "This sucked but dammit guys, you tried your best!" and I will at least give kudos for that.
Yeah that would be nice. But good luck doing it without 99.9999% of the population dying. Then again I wonder if one could argue that creating a permanent global totalitarian state, which would lock humanity out of anything good ever again, would be worse.
Not quite...enshittification is when a product is made worse to increase profit once you have lock-in and network effects on your side. This is more like...shitty planned obsolescence.
There's a reason our former custodian was using his 1970s-era Hoover vacuum cleaner until the day he retired. It was easy to fix, consumable and service parts were widely available everywhere, and it's solidly made. I think he left behind four or five NIB vacuum cleaners sitting in store room as backups that he never needed. I'm pretty sure he took it home with him when he retired. 😄
(FOR NEW REPLIERS: This was made during the Patreon pre-release!) Okay. Quick suggestion. At 32:41, where you do that whole "Welcome to Quick Start" bit, I was expecting some kind of logo cut that completely reframes the last 30 minutes as a cold-open. After reading the Patreon post the first half of the episode gave what I can only describe as the "vibe callback", "that thing some video games do near the end where they briefly revisit a location/vibe from the start" That'd be fun if it were doable but it also may be too much, but I figure screw it, I'll throw it out there (Edit: Ahh, no dice! I think it hits plenty well anyways, I'm glad you found it amusing at least. :) Also means it didn't need a re-edit, which is nice. \o/)
To try to be fair, QuickLook has *some* value: When I worked for the government in the late 2000s, our computers were so loaded up with things that it took a full actual 45 minutes to reach a usable state. And we were required to shut down the machine (not sleep, but fully off) every night before going home, so everyone had a full 45 minutes of unproductive time every single morning. So having a reminder of a meeting coming up in that 45 minute window would actually have been useful.
Genuinely, how on earth is that even physically possible for a machine to take 45 minutes to reach usability I cannot even fathom what you could be loading and on what grade of hardware would make this even remotely possible. I don't doubt you (especially if it was the late 2000s), that's just difficult to wrap my brain around.
Apart from 45 minutes being too much of an exaggeration or not, I also think a little calendar at start would be cool. But, as mentioned on the video, a modification on the boot screen or, some kinda of wallpaper/widget thingy would be way more simple and reliable. But poor bob wouldn't work for 7 months to get his promotion
@@whatr0mirrored the hd from the network on every boot? something like that. the machines could have been from like 8 years before as well and they might have run like a fully customized version of windows nt 4.0 like a lot of militaries did. edit: 100 computers booting from the same network server at the same time of course wouldn't help
Circa 2000 I had an old Toshiba Tecra 800 laptop. It had a small 4200 RPM hard drive and took over 5 minutes to fully boot Windows 98SE. I upgraded it with a 5400 RPM drive (IIRC 120 gig or so) and the higher areal density plus higher RPM slashed the boot time to 2 minutes.
@@lasskinn474 was mirroring an HD from the network on boot a thing in certain situations? I can kind of see the application of it, but the agony this would inflict on spinning harddisks seems like it would make this completely unfeasible unless you're okay burning through harddrives in a month. Not to mention a thin client setup seems like it would be much more suited to the same use cases. 100 computers booting from the same network server does definitely sound a lot more likely, especially cause government IT is notoriously old and slow.
"If someone were to sneak malware into these components" Given this laptop was marketed to executives, and all you would need is a JPEG parsing vulnerability in the Daystarter SMM code... I'm sure someone did. Someone who works for a 3 letter agency (or the equivalent in other alphabets)
I'll be completely honest, the entire back half explanation/rant is exactly why I stay in gamedev despite the bullshit. At least it's a _chance_ to work on something novel or new.
The logical extension of this is Unified Kernel Images (UKI) for Linux. You can now take your Linux kernel and initrd and pack it into a single EFI executable. You can put whatever you want in the initrd, so if you wanted you could have a fully functional graphical Linux system that boots from a single EFI executable.
Pausing the boot process was one of the most horrific computing oddities I have ever seen. It’s bloody sacrilege. Also these “features” copying personal information into a secondary separate partition is truly stupidly bold because they might easily be leaking encrypted information into clear text. I don’t imagine there is a way for these EFI apps or SMM hacks to read from an encrypted drive, so I can see a scenario where an IT dept sets the puter up with Bitlocker but then the end user enables this feature and bam, encrypted mail and calendar data are now sitting in very inviting XML as clear text, on a FAT32 partition. Now imagine if that computer was stolen, and data leaked, thats an expensive lawsuit time bomb for HP. Not that I wouldn’t enjoy them getting shafted… but it’s such an unnecessary risk both for the customers and the company, it’s mind boggling.
As a thought on how Daystar could have worked, it doesn't *have* to be a heuristic - The Windows Boot Manager loads the OEM logo from a known location in the UEFI ROM. Daystar *could* have used the MMU to hook a debugging interrupt when that location is read, like a regular CPU debugger watching a memory location. When that location is read, the Daystar code gets an interrupt letting them know Windows is displaying it's boot splash, and it can do its interception of the video code, essentially clearing the frame buffer, /dev/null'ing windows' attempts to write to the display, and instead writing its own to the screen instead. I don't know for certain, but it's possible the Windows Boot Manager reads the OEM logo each frame, so the Daystar image keeps being sent until Windows Boot Manager stops trying to display the logo. It's also possible this could be abused by a UEFI by replacing the image at that location each time it's read to make an animated boot logo. It would also be worth it as a joke trying to read from the OEM splash logo in Windows and seeing if the display corrupts as Daystar tries to overwrite the screen...
This works for UEFI enabled versions of Windows, but Windows 7 was BIOS only, and has to boot in CSM mode, so that image is just being loaded from the hard drive into a spot in kernel memory. However, you're probably not far off base, because speaking to somebody else who knows UEFI better than I do, they proposed that they're hooking a event that fires when the boot process completes, which for reasons I don't fully understand, still applies even to software booting in CSM mode. But again, I didn't fully get it, and we have no idea if that's really what's happening even if it is plausible.
@@CathodeRayDude A correction: Windows 7 boots fine in UEFI mode and this is how I ran my system for years. The weird bit is it still uses the CSM for video output until the proper drivers load. It's sort of a hybrid setup. But booting Windows 7 in UEFI mode doesn't help here because it still uses its normal fullscreen animation. Windows 8 was the first version to read the BGRT image.
@@eDoc2020 What I've heard is that they didn't add UEFI support until a *very* late revision, after most people had stopped using it, and that it's a real bodge. I don't know if that's precisely true, but the CSM business sounds pretty likely - and doesn't that mean that if you have the CSM disabled or your board doesn't have one, that it won't work at all?
@@CathodeRayDude UEFI boot was added to 64-bit Vista in one of the service packs, it's always been in 7. I believe I've read that 7 technically works without the CSM but you'd be running entirely blind until video drivers load. I don't remember if I actually tried this or not. It would definitely be annoying to install drivers blindly and safe mode would become useless.
What an amazing horrifying look into the abyss! Your analogy with the vacuum cleaners was dead on, all modern ones are terrible because making a good one is a solved problem so the only way to "beat" the competition is on price, and you do that by drifting away from the solved ideal through cost cutting and bullshit features designed to hoodwink the consumer (or exploit the financially restricted ones trying to get the most value they can) on buying a terrible product that they will throw out when it breaks in disgust to go buy a different disappointment lured in by its price and hype
Thumbsup here from someone who has stripped down the motor in their vacuum. It could stand to be less loud but is otherwise 'solved' except for some tinkering.
The part about vacuum cleaners scared me quite a lot, as my current vacuum cleaner (which was bought circa 15 years ago) is starting to kick the bucket and I'm about to buy a new one. I hope it's not *that* bad out there in the vacuum cleaners market...
@@real_yanoosh6553Thankfully there are still good vacuum cleaners out there, but you won't find them in any big box store, have to shop online or at a specialty vac/sew&vac store and they'll cost a few hundred dollards instead of just 30. Oreck Miele Sebo and Sanitaire are a few good ones. Personally I have an Oreck I got 10 years ago after a year suffering with a crap shark as we had an Oreck growing up, and amazingly still made in the USA. Pretty much all good vacuums will be bagged models too. But to most consumers the cheap trash bagless ones that marketing has convinced them is somehow better even though it doesn't capture dirt and will be dead in a few years is the face of modern mass market home cleaning, got to keep those purchases coming to pad the bottom line after all
There's still room for improvement, in various ways, noise, size, durability, weight. Brushless motors are a better way to make a vacuum, and you can get excellent ones (anything central, made by Miele, or the Dyson portables) but they are expensive, as top quality stuff has always been. That said, it's less that the best get better, and more that the performance per dollar does. Cars are a terrible example, they're transformantionally better than they were when I was a child, and that was only 30 years ago. Far more power, reliability, durability, economy, safety, convenience, comfort, the list goes on.
Vacuum cleaners started to compete in sucking power; and it got so ridiculous that EU made a directive to limit the intake power level to 900 W. I have my Hoover of "2000 W" suck level from maybe 2005 or so. I don't believe it ever actually takes 2kW when operating.
20 years ago HP was bungling Itanium, their, and Intel's, attempt to improve the CPU that didn't work out, it depended on the compiler being able to optimize the code to run as fast as possible with certain instructions bundled together to run at the same time and that compiler didn't happen. It was IA-64. Itanium sank Compaq and SGI, among other companies, which were later bought by HP. EFI was a side effect of that project.
Hey so heres an idea, right? We'll make a CPU with like, who cares, hundred something registers, that all shift around and move every time a different function gets called. But some of the registers are special, like registers that are only a single bit wide to hold a true or a false. Or register is the solely hold a memory location to jump to. Or all of the general purpose registers that are constantly doing the can-can in the middle of being yeeted around in a game of Three card Monte, sure! But you know would make it even better? Make it so that the processor has to ingest instructions three at a time, those three instructions have to be one of a set template of types because you can't just put any instruction next to any old instruction, and the CPU will execute the instructions in whatever order at once, parallel, out of order, whatever, except in the places where you have explicitly stated a dependency, that are also baked into the type system so those can only be where we have decided they may need to be! Oh also you have to handle all of the effects of out of order execution yourself. Because trying to do anything with data that was fetched from a speculative load that failed is a processor fault if not done right! I swear, IA64 really reads like a joke. It's like somebody looked at the concept of an esoteric programming language and just thought "I can do one better" so made an esoteric CPU architecture instead. Except instead of just settling for breaking every common convention that was already established, know what had to go and hate you with the fury of the demons that were harnessed to create the language malbolge, amplified by a factor of 6 and etched into a piece of silicon!
@@teknikal_domain Yeah, I had an idea long ago for a CPU where the instruction set changed after every instruction, really just decrypting the code as it is read and executing the plaintext, but you have to load the key first. A stupid idea, granted.
@@teknikal_domain The whole point of Itanium was that all the "bad" complexity of CPU design such as branch prediction and execution ordering is shifted to the compiler. Basically, Itanium was meant to be "more RISC than RISC" where the assembly produced by the compiler is utterly incomprehensive to humans but good for implementing it in hardware. Unfortunately, compilers couldn't produce performant IA64 assembly for normal programs, since runtime behavior can't always be accurately predicted at compile-time, but I trust it made sense in Intel's simulations and microbenchmarks. Ironically, Intel did the exact opposite with the iAPX 432 some years earlier, aka shifted all the compiler complexity to the CPU to create a "micro-mainframe" that implemented high-level programming language constructs in silicon (and ran dog-slow).
That whole part of the rant about power is entirely on-point, I bought my laptop a full DECADE ago and other than ditching the failed hard drive for an SSD, it still runs just as well as it did 10 years ago - better, actually, since it came off the line with Windows 8.1 and a 5400rpm drive instead of an unregistered copy of Win10 Pro and a cheap SATA solid-state. It's got an i7 of some generation or other, and a Geforce card of some kind, with 8 gigs of RAM, and that's perfectly cromulent for running everything it did when I bought it. Similarly, my mid-tier gaming desktop was built 2 years later and other than replacing the failed Western Digital 7200 with yet another cheap SSD upgrade a few years back and throwing an extra stick of RAM in it so I could run Davinci Resolve without thrashing the swap file, it still runs everything including current-gen games at entirely-usable settings. There's really nowhere to go from here, like, I COULD upgrade to a 4k monitor which WOULD need a newer GPU to run games at decent specs and framerates, but why would I do that? It's not like my internet can handle 4k video anyway and 1080p is perfectly fine in a 23" monitor which is the biggest that fits into the shelf alcove of my desk, games run fine at this resolution on the current card, and why spend hundreds of dollars on a monitor that looks very marginally better in very specific circumstances when I can just get another 23" 1080p monitor at Goodwill for less than the price of a Big Mac if this one dies? Hell, I still HAVE several more of these just kinda lying around, I've literally pulled em outta the trash before. The gains over the last decade or so have been marginal at the best of times and are really just nitpicky things that only apply to you if you're either running $150 Black Friday Special craptops that break a hinge every 6 months and get binned, or are trying to run the newest, bestest AAA game titles at the best possible quality and would rather rebuild your entire PC setup for the price of a runs-and-drives 2008 Nissan Altima instead of just sticking an ex-miner GPU in it or buying a lightly used Playstation 5, both of which would cost about 2 trips to the grocery store once you discover Ebay. Hardware vendors are all pushing the "latest and greatest" when there's really no reason to upgrade, and the sole reason the Big 3 semiconductor companies have stayed afloat THIS long is cause of cryptocurrency scams and this latest AI craze. Hell, the only reason CELL PHONES even need upgraded is cause they stop getting updates, and with modern apps the TLC flash they abuse for the system cache starts to get corrupted after about 3-5 years of hard use, so they just kinda bootloop and die every few years - so you buy another $70 refurbished low-mid-tier phone and run it for another few years.
It could be that personal computers themselves have reached a point of unacceptably diminished returns, but also it could just be that the PC platform itself is holding computing back. Macs abandoned that platform a few years ago and surged ahead in performance, to the point that even PCs that try to emulate its success by switching to ARM are struggling to keep up. Maybe what the industry needs is an end to the forever IBM, and to consider a return to breakaway models like the Amiga line.
This video plus Ross Scott on the first Deus Ex is basically a complete summary of modern society. I never expected that a video about an old video game and a video about an old computer would explain how things are better than anything I’ve ever read, but here we are I guess. Excellent work, Gravis.
When I first saw DayStarter in this video, I thought, "Oh, they customized the boot screen. Kind of weird, and I can see how that might be fragile because you aren't supposed to do that, but it's probably mostly harmless," and I thought about it for a bit and figured that probably the worst thing that might happen is Windows reverting it to the normal boot screen. Then, when you pointed out that it has a user interface later in the video, I swear I shouted "NO!" at the screen. This is somehow even more of an ungodly hack than Phoenix Hyperspace, and all of this just to render a calendar during boot time? Wow. Honestly, I'm shocked anyone even bothered to implement something like this. This clearly took a lot of effort, and I really do have to wonder how fragile it is, but what gets me is that the end result doesn't seem like it would be useful to anyone, especially since it's only on screen for a matter of seconds, and let's face it, I doubt *any* end users ever paused the thing, except perhaps out of curiosity.
On the rant at the end: Companies like HP competing in a saturated market arent (usually) trying to differentiate themselves by showing you solutions to problems that don't exist. That stuff is just to stand out at trade shows. What they really do is sell you the jellybeans. And a jellybean dispenser. And the jellybean dispenser chute cleaner. And a stale jellybean buyback plan. All from one place so you can set up and manage a hundred jellybean dispensers at your tricounty area pizza time and fun palaces. This why HP and Dell seem to spend 90% of their energy catering to the needs of large businesses. HP and Dell compete by buying up related tech needs to sell to you as a bundle with a discount. This is why Dell bought VMWare, and HP bought uh... everything 😅
I'm honestly astonished that either of them bother selling computers at Best buy anymore. The fact that they've actually turned around on the secondary market and made it their own with their leasing and refurbishing program is one of the most buckwild things in the history of capitalism. There are so few companies that are willing to buy back and then resell their own product, but from what I understand HP and Dell absolutely thrive on it, they probably lease out more computers from 3 years ago than they sell new ones, and the amount they make off of the accessories, the docks and monitors and whatnot, has to be phenomenal. It's why I'm so shocked that they bother trying to make new features like this, when their real business is simply having every executive at every company on speed dial and being the first name they think of when they want 300 new laptops.
Who even buys Hinge Problem DeleteBooks anyway, Latitude and ThinkPad are far superior, or at least ThinkPad was until they started rebadging IdeaPads.
@@CathodeRayDude I work at a very large regional school, I think you north americans would call it a community college. we have like 18,000 students and 2000 staff over several towns and cities. We buy everything from HP. (except printers and phones) since 1995.... Our Pc + laptop registration numbers run in 6 digits and yes , I think we started at 0, since I can trace down about 40,000 of them. I should ask our business controller how much we spend on HP per year, but i don;t know if he is allowed to answer.......... and we have no reason to get HP instead of Dells , it's just tradition, and apparently they never screwed up bad enough for the board of a school directors to pick a new supplier.
@@CathodeRayDude It's the same way I feel about Microsoft's consumer efforts tbh. We've all seen their investor calls; all the money comes from them being the first and only company that gets considered when an enterprise needs operating systems and office suites for a fleet of 10,000 machines.
@@pocketpc_ What baffles me is that coasting on a reputation only works for so long. Eventually, it'll give out. What's their plan then? I've observed repeatedly of late that new versions of Windows have become increasingly bad at "being Windows" - getting out of the user's way and letting them use their computer. That's what I've always heard from non-techies regarding why they continued to use Windows: it doesn't get in the way enough to make learning a different OS worthwhile. But now, bringing up Windows around the average user will probably just draw a litany of complaints about random reboots, clicking on things opening random Edge windows, etc. And yet, there's still no built in utility to bulk rename files based on a pattern in Windows. There sure is in Linux Mint, though. Not sure about Mac, but I wouldn't be surprised either way. This isn't a threat to Microsoft's market share today, really. But as the video mentioned, Windows 11 failed to trigger a software refresh. Clearly, Windows' reputation has declined from "We always have to be on the latest version" to "When we get new OSs, we get Windows". If Windows 12 fails to do so as well, then Microsoft will have a serious problem on their hands.
15:30: OK, I got one for you. Literally every spotty or nonexistent data connection ever, be it airplane mode to being in a Faraday cage of a cavernous concrete building, to "I just don't have a dataplan because I'm in Nebraska and nobody has signal in Nebraska if they're not not on wifi" situations. And this is a pet peeve of mine: ALL PHONE APPS MUST WORK RELIABLY OFFLINE just feels obvious. "Synchronize shit, even if it's hard" is something POP3 clients did, so I'm not super interested in excuses when a fediverse client or navigation app or chat program can't do it. Cool, give me what you already got, let me queue up stuff so it goes out later, do what you can when you get a connection in the background.
As someone who has worked in the industry for a long time. (been working on computers since 1989) You are 100% correct with your assessment. The only thing pushing "innovation" for these manufactures. Is middle management looking for some edge for a buck. Solving problems that don't exist just so they have something to show. Now software and hardware makers they have room to grow but your are also correct that the updates and change we get are very minor from year to year. Unless your doing something super heavy a computer from 5 years ago is going to run almost everything.
"There are good engineers at HP." Yeah, in the "write viruses for ink cartridges so we can force people to subscribe to get new ones every month" department.
Good or lawful evil? I'd argue that a good engineer would later be lauded in something akin to "The Story of Mel". Like, "non-genuine" ink would make the printer work better and nobody would be able to figure out how to reverse his hack.
For what it's worth I would quite happily listen to you just grumbling about daft trends in capitalism but the computer stuff is also welcome too! You do have me wondering if we'll ever get to a point where the "innovation" obsession just dies and as a society we can just make stuff we know works and is reliable and good at what it does, and ideally doesn't need replacing every five minutes, and find literally anything else to do with our lives except work to make and sell disposable crap so we can afford to buy disposable crap. Does seem like a very post-capitlist thing though, hard to imagine it happening as things are now.
On the rant at the end - my home lab virtual machine server is a laptop from 2011. It was a high-end laptop, sure. And it has maxed RAM and dual SSDs from 2017. But at its heart, it’s a laptop from 2011. Heck, its CPU wasn’t even seriously outmatched until 2018. It’s one of the earliest quad core laptops, but quad core was still as good as you could get in a laptop until pretty recently, and is still perfectly normal. And it does its job great. It runs 4-6 VMs of various OSes at the same time, including some RAM-intensive stuff. If it wasn’t for games, my primary Windows desktop would still be a Core 2 Quad with Radeon 5000-series.
Same thing here. My newest homelab machine runs a Ryzen 1700X. Everything else is from the Intel Skylake dark ages like my 6700T and 5775C machines. They work perfectly fine. They are all capable of being completely usable windows machines if I wanted them to be. Instead they run things like a Minecraft server with an obscene amount of RAM for one and the most tortured NAS of all time (3 consecutive drive deaths in a month).
@@AnonymousFreakYTmy my main laptop is a maxed out Thinkpad W530 from 2012 and it’s still kicks ass. Have no need to upgrade because it still does everything that I want fast enough to not be worth upgrading. (Excluding the graphics performance, that’s the one thing that it sucks at compared to todays machines)
Man.. you explaining HP DayStarter brought me more joy and laughs than most modern comedy. thank you. I love this series with all my heart. I remember a lot of these machines as they were in use while I was working in PC Sales/Service, these features were always fascinating to me.
And now we have the full circle of dystopia with planned obsolescence. Batteries was the "killer app" for getting to sell more so hey! Lets glue them stuck in our devices, cars etc. The latest Walkman moment was the iPhone moment. And then they just did more of the same. Great video BTW.
I loudly screamed “No!” When you mentioned SMM. Also, I understand the reason such a thing exists but the concept of something that can override the kernel and ignore NMIs is vaguely terrifying.
Bravo. Absolutely wonderfully essential rant. This applies to almost everything made in the last 5-10 years. It's all been done, and somebody just wants to see more spit polish on plastic.
I know a method to pause the boot process in theory, and it's one you can even do on a MOS 6502 (I should know, because I've written code to explicitly do this on a MOS 6502). I'm not saying this is what HP did, but it's the first thing springs to my mind. Windows is taking over the processor to boot. When you pause you will be halting the processor; straight up issuing a BRK instruction. However, day planner will be running in an interrupt and even if the main processor task is halted an interrupt being triggered will still cause the program pointer to jump to the interrupt code, execute, and return from interrupt to it's halted state. To resume, just tell the processor to continue execution. Have you ever seen your computer completely lock up but you can still move the mouse cursor? Same thing. Mouse input is handled via an interrupt and the operating system scheduler outside of interrupt has halted the processor. EDIT: HA! I should've just watched the video for a couple extra minutes. Yup! It's running in interrupt (SMI). If there is enough evidence out there to say it *might* be running in interrupt, then it absolutely is running in interrupt. EDIT 2: My Managing Director literally said to the development team "we need to introduce AI into our marketing" and everyone, even the CTO, died a little inside. It's why every website and product in less than a few months now has "AI!" on the proverbial box; Artificial Intelligence doesn't exist, especially the way people envision it and that is VERY true of almost any company who slaps it all over their website. When you type in that search box, you aren't invoking some magical AI, you're contacting AWS Elastisearch, which is the Amazon implementation of Elastisearch that first came out in 2010, which itself is based on Lucene that came out in 1999, which is based on the Vector Space Model first described in *1962*. The first iPhone came out in 2007 and (at least consumer) technology since then has been profoundly boring. We've reached the end-game.
I do get lock ups like this, relatively often, and I have never thought it'd be anything to do with this. I just assumed it was just a Windows thing. interesting, thank you.
HP also made 11.6" models of some of their line-up and they were the only netbooks worth using, because they at least had U-suffix core processors and not those lousy atom things, which had less processing power than a clipped toe nail.
@@GojiraX I believe i had the 2170p at around 10 years ago, but without the touchscreen. The only problem i had with it was the really awful LCD TN panel. The colours were completely out of whack, the viewing angles 0° and contrast nonexistent. I saw laptops in the 90's which did much better. But HP was not alone. In the late 2000's/early 2010's a lot of other more expensive laptop manufacturers did this. I was glad when i at some point, when i was still at TU munich got a student discount for a 14" laptop with a proper IPS panel.
@@dustojnikhummer I don't remember if this configuration was sold where i live. Only saw the awful TN panel ones. In my eyes inexcusable, because it wasn't a cheap machine. When looking at a slightly off angle, black turned into green. When i met my SO at university, it became impossible to watch a movie or study together. There were compatible IPS panels being sold on eBay by CN vendors few years later. But as said, HP wasn't alone. The ThinkPad base models at this came with similar rubbish panels, worse than what they sold 20 years ago.
There were some amd versions of those laptops. They'd give an atom a run for it's money in slowness. The only redeeming quality is the graphics being better what Intel shipped at that time.
47:18 I think what happens at that point is that competition starts making up issues, consumers get a worse product than before until someone realizes "how about we just make a damn vacuum cleaner that just sucks?" and the cycle repeats. I believe we're in an intermediary stage when it comes to consumer laptops, where they don't really include insane features anymore and manufacturers are slowly but surely gonna start making good, solid laptops again(I'm thinking old ThinkPad quality and upgrade-ability and shit).
What a wild ride, and as you said at the end, we hardly looked at the PC at all! I am in the lower-middle of "knowing things about computers" and when you said it pauses the boot process, I shook in fear. Is this more or less heinous than running 2 OS-es at once in separate halves of ram?
More heinous, since this is an active process - the worst thing Hyperspace can do is crash your machine, not cause continuous ongoing memory corruption
@@CathodeRayDudeIf I were the engineer that got foisted on the grenade of having to write this gawd-awful malware, I'd try to do some sort of belt, suspenders, skyhooks and staples approach to ensuring it never ran past the startup. Hell, I'd throw in an absolute maximum time limit before exiting, just to be sure it at least reached a desktop if every other possibility failed. So I guess the real question is, are the engineers at HP (and more importantly their managers) any good?
@@oasntet absolutely. there are ways to keep this from being an *eldritch* horror, just a regular one... and we have no idea if they took any of them. Chilling
It goes deep as hell too. I'm a hardware engineer for Intel. We have a running joke that the lowest ring is the engineer manually smacking bits into instruction cache. We have specialized boards that can tell the CPU to just stop. Not do nothing for the next N cycles, but hard stop. 0hz kind of stop. It just stays in whatever state until we tell it to go again. The Turing machine tape moves when and how we tell it to. A chip so fast it does addition in the time it takes light to go from your light bulb to the floor can be reduced to an 8086 with the right set of jumpers.
Your last theory made me realize that's the very reason my laptop CPU was frying itself while gaming. For some years now it has been the a normal thing having auto overclock on certain conditions like load, temperature limits, power draw, battery and so on. Is it really necessary? Not really, but sometimes a speed bump is appreciated and that's how turbo modes came to be. But it has been out of control lately and following your theory I assume is because Bob needs to show every year how much bester they can make Asus laptops in this case. And more GHZs mean more speed and more speed means bester laptop, so they activate turbo mode by default with a super aggresive profile that goes beyond the CPU maker recomendations even if it's within spec but also you can't disable or tinker it in the BIOS because the Apple brainworm has infected every hardware maker. Sometimes a saint appears and codes a program that lets you manage power states and voltages through Windows, but I couldn't find any for my laptop configuration. So I had to add a value in the registry to unlock a hidden config in energy setting to disable Windows from turboing the CPU when what I really wanted was to control the temp limit and do some undervolting. At least my CPU doesn't go to 90Cº anymore because of D2R and stays at a comfy 70º. Thanks Asus, I hate it.
These series never cease to amaze me with how much work and imagination is put into making these trivial and useless features work, and then they seem to faceplant on the finish straight. I feel many of them could be made pretty usable with a bit more polishing and features on the software itself, but it feels like they are shipped as a proof of concept and then immediately forgotten. It's like going through the effort of engineering a whole car and then only adding the controls for driving backwards and turning left.
32:27 I gasped audibly and clutched my hand to my chest in shock, horror, and disgust. Had to pause in order to comment; now eagerly(?) looking forward to the explanation of this atrocity! Update: 37:27 I let out an "oh, f$ck..." because I know *exactly* what that means. Wow.
Good god was this a terrific video, fell off my chair with those reveals. And with that final speech I think you hit the nail on the head so well. I've come to the same conclusion about smartphones four years ago: we have managed to produce SoCs that can do everything one user could ask for, but they get deprecated and replaced by overkill shit, while most people that can't afford a >300 usd handset will have to buy literal landfill, which chips that were outdated from the moment they were fabbed. It's living in a cuckoo world to have companies touting sustainability and climate targets while producing so much utter waste, and it's not like making products that were worth it was that much higher; they would really just shoot themselves in the face if they didn't have a promised upgrade cycle. Though we see the post "USP" world in automotive already today. Corporate consolidations and agreed upon platform-sharing, on top of (as you stated) most of the work being done by parts OEMs (BOSCH designed most of the Fiat 500e, by the way) makes every car even less distinctive than before. An Opel, Dodge, Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, or Peugeot can share the same whole stuff underneath, with a bunch of parts developed 20 years ago, because developing different stuff for each model would be prohibitively expensive due to emissions constraints. And so much of the complexity goes away with the move to EVs. So the entire play now is connected vehicles, subscription services, and leasing. Welcome to hell
I don't know what it says about me that I was like, oh yeah, you could do that with SMM when you showed that you could press a key. I don't know why I wasn't immediately horrified until you pointed out how absolutely horrifying it is :)
I didn't even know about SMM etc. before this but when I saw that it was interactable *during boot* I was like "what!? How is that possible... It shouldn't be, right? What the actual fuck!? Modifying a bootsplash, that's easy... but it being interactive... how in the fuck".."
@@Δημήτρης-θ7θonly problem is that’s something that happened in the late 2000’s, any time after that (plus or minus a few years) has been just spinning wheels going nowhere and unsolving previously solved problems. (The entire electronics industry is guilty of this, especially since the late 2010’s onwards)
Just for the "y tho?" end rant alone, this has become one of my favorite tech videos ever. But the rest of the video is peak Quick Start already, so really this is just peak CRD
I am actually shooketh! I honestly never knew the Ring-3 and Ring -2 existed, no wonder Spectre/Meltdown and all following other shite exists. But daaaang. Also have to add (new sub) love the channel, someone's as passionate about old computers as me! :D
This is like my WearOS watch that shows the time during bootup, but it boots up so fast that this is only visible for a second before the actual UI gets shown. Also, if you are wondering what HP engineers do nowadays, I've recently seen their new full-sized desktop keyboard. They removed the scroll lock light, removed the right windows button (and made the right alt, menu and right ctrl very wide), and did some moving around of the print screen, scroll lock and pause keys to confuse people.
In terms of the time in the boot screen, my guess is that was from an engineer trying to debug a problem with the clock being wrong on boot much earlier when the boot process took far longer, so having access to the watch time before it finished booting was immensely useful so he wasn't spending as much time waiting for the watch to boot. And once the watch shows you the time whole booting... why are you going to take literally any time at all to remove a feature, even one that's preeminently useless? You have to replace it with something, and anything you can replace it with is, at best, exactly as useful. Might as well leave it alone, you have real problems to fix. At least that's what it feels like to me, I've added start up features to programs for debugging sake that got left in because I didn't have anything better to replace them with.
Right Windows is not a key on mechanical keyboards either (not that one needs more than one 'Super' key). It was replaced by the 'Fn' key, used as a modifier for keyboard functions (usually media keys). Windows lock can be a useful, though.
@@Code7Unltd On your mechanical keyboard maybe. There's so much variation in key layouts in that market that any blanket statement is categorically impossible.
The second you said "dot ee eff eye" I screamed and threw my phone because I realized *HP created a GUI EFI binary mail spooler*. The horror. (Technically EFI binaries aren't OSes as they don't have a kernel. MS-DOS does/did.) Edit/Update: OK now you're talking about them putting it in the SMM and I'm crying, I'm suing for emotional damages
Thank you so much for just being great.Being the way you are with these long videos about the most obscure tech no one would care about .Yet I do watch them,thnks to you.
"Put it system management mode" lolololol.... I knew the email thing was EFI from the get go but I never would have imagined someone doing a full program of any kind in SMM.
"I'm sorry this video ended up being an hour of me talking-" THAT'S WHY WE'RE HERE, GRAVIS. THAT'S WHY WE WATCH YOUR VIDEOS. TO HEAR YOU TALK FROM A POSITION OF EXPERIENCE AND RESEARCH.
About 10-15 years ago I worked in sales for a telecommunications company and my guess with these quickstart things was that it was the sales reps (and the people selling to them) that pushed for these features so they would have something to demo that was unique. I'm basing this on a having a rep from a laptop company (it might have been HP I don't remember) demo a quickstart system to me and my fellow sales reps at a work thing.
I've been needing a way to burn an hour while waiting for my guitar to arrive in the mail, so this was possibly the best way to do so, because it actually kept my attention for the entirety of said hour.
this past month(or thereabouts) has seen so many uploads from you, it's exciting! my husband and I usually get really excited & wait to watch your videos with each other, it's been pretty sweet getting one once a week honestly
This had me on the edge of my seat. I kept trying to picture what absolutely criminal thing they had to be doing to pull this off and I just couldn’t. The reveal was horror-movie-esque, well done.
I don't know the exact mechanism, but my understanding is there is a standardized way for UEFI code to check whether the OS has completed booting so watchdog timers can be setup to reset the machine in the case the OS fails to boot. So it's probably less fragile than you're thinking.
I can almost imagine this as an scene from Star Trek: "Captain, I have something here." "What is it lieutenant?" "No... it can't be... it's running directly off the motherboard." "You're saying it's running alongside the bios?" "No, sir. It IS the bios" (MUSICAL STINGER, CUT TO COMMERCIAL)
The first time I realized how different UEFI was is when I had to compile some diagnostics software to troubleshoot a broken TPM. Wild stuff when you consider how badly things can go. Great video, as always.
the talk about features takes my back to my 2011 thinkpad, which had a bright blue button on the keyboard titled "Thinkvantage". all it did was interrupt the boot process and give you a list with shortcuts to the system setup and a temporary boot menu. I used this button a lot because I dualbooted on that laptop and it was easier then trying to figure out how to add both windows and linux to a boot manager.
"Bob is in hell, and he's making it your problem." The corporate world in a nutshell. I figured when you hit pause that there was some level of hijacking going on but holy shit that's bad.
Hey, I think you're really being unfair to executives; they don't just run Outlook. They also schedule and "run" dozens of meetings that serve no purpose and *could* be an email. Frankly, I *wish* all they did was run Outlook.
(Spoilers below)
I would like to note that after publishing the video I've spoken to one firmware engineer, and read about a dozen posts from another (Matthew Garrett), and my takeaway is: no, the SMM has _not_ been left alone as it should be, it _has_ been leveraged for a bunch of reprehensible hacks by vendors who didn't want to do things the right way. But nothing on this level that I'm aware of. When I said "corporate bullshit," I was referring to _what we see here,_ stuff in the vein of advertising, not solutions to some kind of genuine problem, and I don't _think_ the SMM's been abused for that. But honestly, at this point, nothing would shock me.
I'd love to read more about SMM, could you link to Matthew's posts?
aye, i like that capstone shirt
Cyrix abused SMM for VGA emulation in the MediaGX. It had only basic framebuffer 8bpp and 16bpp video support so the firmware watches for access to VGA memory and registers to emulate the 16 color planar modes and text mode. It was super slow and terrible.
When you were explaining how the operating system was in total control, in my head I was going ‘well _technically_ there's the negative rings but yeah, fair enough’. I honestly didn't get that you were foreshadowing, I was floored when you dropped your bombshell.
I have to say, while what they did is wrong and should not be attempted in a production environment (even more so given the non-existant benefits), I have to say they habe earned my begrudging respect for the sheer overkill. Cobble together a half-assed hypervisor with insufficient hardware support just so you can flash a useless feature on the screen for a second? There should be an award for that.
@@xmlthegreat mjg59.dreamwidth.org/35110.html
mjg59.dreamwidth.org/52149.html
Here's a couple bangers
doing shit that sounds like the way you'd design an NSA backdoor into something to make a calendar app load 10 seconds faster has been such a bizarre recurring theme of this series.
Your explanation at the end perfectly explains why every company remotely related to technology has shoved “AI” into their products: it’s the only thing they had left to add.
I came so close to putting a screenshot up of an article from The Register about how AI is happening because "win 11 didn't trigger a refresh cycle"
@@CathodeRayDudeI at least get the impression that the AI hype was more organic from the public thanks to the chatbot "demo" blowing their minds, but I suppose the huge investments in AI are coming from the hunt for the "next big thing". Funnily enough the perfect example of desperation for a differentiating feature was the "Next big thing is here" commercials Samsung ran in the early 2010s for the Galaxy S phones, so desperate to have something that could "make them better than the iPhone" when the only problems left to solver in smartphones were bigger/better/faster screen/storage/network/processor
@@CathodeRayDudeDo it!
And all the while phone manufacturers keep pushing new models with "AI" features baked in, I keep repeating myself: guys, it's just software. They COULD make that AI-crap run on every phone up to 10 years old, but they purposefully chose to make it arbitrarily exclusive to their latest model.
They just can't think of anything to add anymore, because smartphones are "done". Any smartphone up to 5 years old, holds up perfectly well, except for the fact that it arbitrarily doesn't recieve updates anymore, while your banking app demands an Android version no more than 3 years old, for reasons nobody at bank can be arsed to explain properly.
@@thany3 yeah. my phone is going on 6 years old now. it does everything i need it to and then some. The only reason i have to get a new one is software updates and the degrading battery. Also, does anyone actually NEED this AI stuff? I mean, you can do cool stuff for sure with AI, but I don't need it shoved into everything like IoT and internet connectivity was shoved into everything a few years ago..
The idea of some CEO lugging around all his outlook data in unencrypted XML files in some random FAT32 partition is pretty funny to me
It's really funny that you're the first person to point this out, more than an hour after I release the video, because I expected to get a flood of comments about it since I completely missed it. Like, the cursedness of the whole thing was so immense that I completely failed to notice that it just exposes all of your email in two completely different ways - Quick look has no authentication, so anybody who presses that button can just read your shit, but even if you didn't have the whole laptop, you could just plug the hard drive in to a USB adapter and copy the XML files off from any old PC, with no special tools. This is perhaps the biggest honey pot for an evil maid attack that I have ever seen in my life, but because I couldn't imagine anybody actually using it in good faith, it never even occurred to me to contemplate the security implications if you actually did. I feel like that really tells so much of the story, this thing was so terrifying that it hid an even more obviously terrifying behavior in plain sight.
I mean, was BitLocker even a thing back then? And what's more, was it _used_? If not, then the NTFS partition would've been unencrypted as well, wouldn't it?
@@ondrikbI think Bitlocker was available for Vista and onwards, so around for that machine. For "was it used", well tbh I don't know. I would assume any half way competent enterprise IT would enable it but they would probably also throw this whole FAT32 Partition of that laptop
@@CathodeRayDude Well I mean, sure it was easy to access data for someone without computer skills... but back in the day there was no disk encryption (I think Bitlocker or Truecrypt where an option, but encryption was expensive), so you just needed a Linux live USB to boot the computer and see that data from the NTFS partition. If the computer had a password at all, of course, something that was not used back in the days (most computers back in the day didn't have that, it's only a recent thing that everything has to have a password, and still most user don't set it because you have to remember it).
Also executives... they are usually the kind of persons that have their password written on a post-it attached to the monitor anyway.
Does QuickLook even have a password anyway? If not you can pretty much borrow your CEO's laptop and take a quick peek or even sneak an email, and it won't even leave a trace that the computer was used because it doesn't even boot an OS where the audit software would be!
I wonder if specially crafted JPEGs would pwn that SMM atrocity like the recent LogoFail exploits.
The delta between the technical wizardry and tolerance for stupid, unneeded risk needed to pull off such a hack and the thing they used these things for is... stunning. It's like hacking the Pentagon to increase the default size of the mouse pointer. I love it.
my favorite comments on this video so far are the analogies and this is a good one
@@CathodeRayDudeThank you!
That reminds me of a story Dave Plummer (Dave's Garage) (the guy who wrote Windows Task Manager) shared. The immigration officers heard he worked at Microsoft and were basically detaining him until they fixed his issue with Word. I'm definitely not giving the story justice.
HP DayStarter is kinda like changing the laws of the universe to make your kettle boil 10 seconds faster. A show of eldritch power harnessed for an innocuous and very pointless purpose.
It's the oft re-told tale of the aircraft carrier captain who calls in to have them change their heading so the sun doesn't come through the porthole while he's eating his morning bagel.
I do wonder if that is a true story or just something someone cooked up... It's so hilariously specific and petty that I have hard time imagining someone just making it up...@@cdigames
At least the aircraft carrier captain has some real power, sure they're using it for frivolous purposes *now*, but they could be using it to bomb a small nation out of existence (I never said it was a good sort of power, okay!).
This is like someone stowed away aboard an aircraft carrier and modified the helm controls so they could interfere with them, simply so they could have a way to eat their breakfast without the sun in their eyes, because they didn't want the hassle of having to put up an umbrella.
@@Lyrainthevalley and then, 15 years later someone looks at the logs and see inexplicable course alterations every morning around 9.30-10.15 in the mornings (and maybe sometimes around supper time) and the museum ship curator finds a weird little cabin in a mostly inaccessible area with a porthole… 😅
@@Lyrainthevalley " good sort of power "
Imagine the engineer on NVidia actually using the GPUs for ray-tracing of videogames, we could have cinema-like quality in videogames at 60 fps, instead of the AI bullshit. I hope that bubble pops, and raytracing becomes cheaper because all that hardware has to go somewhere (unlike the ASIC miners on the previous gold-rush, which are literally useless for anything else).
The systolic array technology was made in 2010 for that purpose, it was never for the stupid linear algebra matrices of ReLU of a glorified auto-complete.
As someone that works at HP the whole rant about an executive firing everyone until they find someone that blurs out the worst idea possible, it's soooo true! hahahahahaha
In the civil service, we'd call it "new manager syndrome" basically any new executive that started had to do some incredible project to justify their pay packet, if you worked there long enough, you'd see the the same projects being rolled out by new managers every few years.
@@TheKumaDono it's the same reason one of the first thing's a lot of new managers do is layoff a bunch of people and clean house, gives a great impression to their bosses of making "hard decisions" no matter how useless it is
@@whatr0 Often, it's worse than useless since they're usually weakening the company in the process. It's akin to a man cutting off his leg to lose weight
@@whatr0 AKA Booting all the talent and experience for a bunch of newbies who have no clue what they are doing and won't think to question the boss.
"Why did you make my railroad straight?"
"Looked like a BOX for a GeForce 4." My god, perfect, accurate description. What was it with early 2000s computer marketing design, like what a wild time.
I personally don't mind a bit of colour and flamboyance in box art, but some were indeed taking it a few steps too far. As for UEFI designs, I like to compare them to 2005-era websites, except in an alternate universe where dark mode was the norm, rather than light mode.
Now it has to be said, UEFI interfaces are designed in Asia, mainly. Those countries have always produced the most, let's say, "traditional looking" websites, some even to this day. It should be no surprise that their affinity with website design in general translates to regular software design pretty much 1-to-1.
Better than the actually just grey uniform boxes of modern nvidia things.
Basically, the memories of tron were colliding with the spirit of apple's tactile UI, creating an evil abomination synonymous with tech.
Some of those interfaces... I'd take plain grey boxes over a laggy UEFI menu any day.
"3D CGI is the future!"
Here's my theory: HP was heavily involved in developing EFI to begin with (remember their sad and contractual devotion to the Itanium...) so they definitely knew how to mess with it. It's also quite possible that someone that worked on Windows 7 ended up at HP making the whole process a bit easier. So a couple of guys with the know how came up with this idea and installed it on their slow AF desktop that HP wouldn't replace to look at their schedule while they booted. Then some middle manager passed by, glanced at it, asked the guys about it, and despite the guys telling him that this was NOT SAFE he started a crusade to have this included in the next laptop to get a bonus. Tada!
Dang that rant is 🌶. Solid, and spoken in the language of tech, a dialect so rarely interested in delivering rants that aren't 100% capital-L Libertarian. Great writing!
the 1 person who buys hp laptops off amazon with no criminal intent
So true
I hate that i know exactly what "capital-L Libertarian" means
*Half-Life 2 HEV suit voice* Late stage Capitalism existential crisis: Activated.
I've never been able to express as clearly why, as someone that loves technology, I so incredulously hate it. He hit it on the head so eloquently.
Halfway through: "hah, this HP laptop is a silly hack!"
At the end: "AND THAT'S WHY WE MUST DESTROY CAPITALISM! WE HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT OUR CHAINS!"
Best tech video ever.
wild Foone sighting!
did not know you were a TH-camr. 😮
I'm definitely pro-capitalism, but shit like this makes you question it at least a little bit.
@Damaniel3 not sure if you're from the USA, but one of the people running for President wants to put a ten percent tariff on everything entering the USA including food. Fruits and vegetables that cannot be grown in our climate would be most affected and end up making it even harder to eat... but the country would profit by billions. 🙄 in other words, screw the poor, make the rich richer.
@@Damaniel3 Capitalism was the best solution (we knew of) to fix the problems of Feudalism and large scale pre-capitalist societies.
It's just for some reason in the mid-20th century folks threw their hands up and said "We did it. We perfected economics. Nothing can ever get better"
So things never do get better.
And most of the societies that did try (Soviet Union, China, etc.) seemingly just came up with "Capitalism, but what if instead of Capitalists, its the Government" which doesn't change the structure/nature of the system, it just changes who benefits from it.
"Bob Needs A Bonus" should be the name of a recurring video series. Products that are defined or sold by one dumb feature that really didn't need to exist and has no real world benefit, but does anyways because, well, Bob Needs A Bonus. Or at the very least, make it a recurring phrase to describe such a thing.
The rant at the end was worth the whole watchtime. It reminded me of a rant Technology Connections made about toaster companies and why we can never expect innovative toasters ever again. Seems like the real boot-time-speedup was the executive bonuses we met along the way.
Regarding the pop-up at 50:48, I'd love to see a video on what you think PCs could and should be.
Indeed, for all of HP's intents and purposes (namely getting a bullet point on a feature list that Dell doesn't have, and getting bonuses to middle management) these features probably worked amazingly. And agreed, I'd love to see that video as well, it's something I have some strong opinions on as well and I'd be very curious to hear more opinions on that :)
Oh god. I just paused the game I was playing when CRD said it was running on the SMM shouted out "NO!" and sat here for a moment in shock. I felt some tears starting to build from the horror.
I didn't expect a video about a calendar viewer to be such a roller coaster of emotions. At one moment we're looking at a cute little UEFI app and getting fascinated by some seemingly impossible computer wizardry and the next moment we're feeling resentment over how this wizardry was achieved before finally getting hit with the ennui of late stage capitalism.
Listening to your point about middle management unsolving problems while I was at work scanning copies of pen and paper quarterly count sheets so my manager can manually input them felt awfully prophetic.
When you mentioned the three power buttons that launch three separate OSs, my partner immediately said "one OS always tells the truth, another always tells lies..."
The reveals in this series are scarier than any Black Mirror episode
Welcome to the end of computing. And the end of capitalism.
When he brought up SMM I SCREAMED.
@@pocketpc_ I was expecting hypervisor shenanigans, or tasking one of the cores with updating the framebuffer until Windows takes over it, maybe a video overlay or just messing with the GOP driver until real drivers kick in. Or maybe it just override the splash screen of the BIOS as Windows really only displays the loading spinner on top. Or maybe it's a bootloader that adds 5 seconds to your boot time so you can see the calendar.
Then he mentioned SMM and I froze at the horror. This thing loads user-provided JPEGs, so one can probably straight up gain control of SMM code. Yikes, that's like even worse than LogoFail in potential.
Been a while since I laughed as hard as when you said "SMM". Wonderful, a rootkit that displays a calendar. Nothing could ever possibly go wrong with this.
a -debugger- calendar
This is the best rant I've heard in quite a while.
"HP put DayStarter in the goddamned System Management Mode."
That's a bucket of ice water to the face if I've ever heard one.
“Bob is in hell, and he’s making it your problem.” Absolutely sent me.
As someone who works in information security, and spent many years in firmware security with a focus in UEFI. I was screaming multiple times in this video.
Somehow, HP did QuickLook right. Everything else? 😱
I should note - a UEFI NTFS driver is considered to be a sign of firmware-level infection. Firmware monitoring utilities will throw a holy fit if they see an NTFS driver in UEFI, it’s considered such a terrible idea. That’s one thing HP did right by keeping everything on FAT32.
The other is signing the UEFI binary. Frighteningly, major motherboard vendors have had UEFI that doesn’t require signed executables as recently as 2021. (HP thankfully is not one of those.)
> Firmware monitoring utilities will throw a holy fit if they see an NTFS driver in UEFI, it’s considered such a terrible idea.
Clearly not a bad idea enough for Apple, they have APFS & HFS drivers in EFI and an entire WiFi stack so you can download an OS restore image from the internet
@@unicodefox Apple uses their own custom hardened EFI. Network stacks including WiFi are normal though. An Apple’s APFS & HFS aren’t drivers in EFI, they’re in the boot loader.
UEFI NTFS drivers causing alarm is not so much because it's an inherently BAD idea and more because there's just not any reason to use one unless you're writing malware. 99.9% of the use case for UEFI is "launch setup_utility.efi or boot.efi on startup", neither of which requires NTFS support.
So the UEFI:NTFS driver that was written by the developer of the Rufus tool is a horrible thing?
Excuse my ignorance, this is a black box for me.
If my memory serves me right (since I dont have a Mac for quite a while), the EFI partition Apple was using for Intel Macs was formatted in HFS+.
On the question of is EFI an operating system, I personally consider EFI to be an evolution of DOS - It's a single-tasking, complete-access-to-the-hardware OS that's cooked into the hardware. For fun, grab yourself an EFI Shell application. The 'map' command will show you the recognized filesystems. They're accessed with DOS-like notation - FS0: for the first filesystem, FS1: for the second filesystem, etc. dir to show the contents. cd \ or cd\[whatever] to change working directory. EFI is very DOS-like, albeit much more fully developed and functional for modern systems and requirements.
It's not surprising that EFI is so DOS-like, considering it was created for a wintel platform.
Is that really an efi thing though? Or is that the shell? I couldn't one just write an efi shell that closely emulates bash
@@jedixo My understanding that it's more of a shell thing, because internally disks are identified by UIDs, but for something like shell using UIDs is very inconvenient. I'd say it's actually closer to Windows in that regard.
@@hikkamoriidoes Itanium count as a Wintel platform?
@@daemonspudguy I'd count it as one, because it is a platform made by Intel to run Windows. Now, whether it actually went trough with that is another question.
About that rant: I sometimes say the same thing about software. Especially software that's been around for a long time, like MS Office.
It's just done. It was done 15 years ago. There is no feature that you could reasonably want from an office suite, that wasn't in MS Office 15 years ago. It's just done, complete, finished. All they had to do, is release security patches, bugfixes, maybe some packs with effects and such, and improve compatibility with newer Windowses.
The only reason you might be using a laterly built feature, is because either Microsoft or your boss is telling you to. Something like cloud storage. This could easily have been an addon to Office XP.
actually i think the biggest improvement that i found when i used the free online version is that it now also suggest how to build your sentence structure using the same principals as chat-gpt. so auto correct now can work on a whole sentence and detect if you maybe wrote something weird. but yeah, other then that there is not a lot you could do with word or something. i don't know what plugins can do, but adding new media types in power point is something i can see as useful.
Office 97 is running perfectly fine on Windows XP SP3 in a virtual machine in 2024, and it is so much faster than Office 2019, and Access97 is so much less buggy than Access2019. I cannot be the only one using it today.
The only legitimate improvement I found was the .-x extension files that Office '07 and later spit up take up less space than equivalent pre-Office 2003 file formats. And the search prompt in Office 2016, the only reason I would use modern Office. However, with LibreOffice I still get what I need done and I don't really miss the search prompt (I don't even know if LO has it)
@@joedoe3688most versions of Word or even Works will still run in modern Windows anyway.
I actually make extensive use of new Excel features; Power Query and array functions are life-changing for a full-time spreadsheet jockey. Everything else was perfected in Office 2007 at the latest, Word and PowerPoint especially.
UEFI was already available as a thing by 2003 for the x86 platform, but at that point it was universally only used by server systems. If HP had switched their laptops to UEFI then, and implemented QuickLook at the time of the first Centrino CPUs, this would have been amazing. But as you said, by 2010, it was nearly unnecessary.
If you watch to the end you can see that they were properly using it in 2007, which makes so much sense.
QuickLook did exist back then, but it loaded from Compact Flash or SD Cards on a few supported devices (TC1000, TC1100). I've examined the files and I have no idea how it's actually booting, but it does load in under 10 seconds to a UI that is powered by some very stripped down HTML/JS renderer. It doesn't support data entry at all, but it does let you view custom HTML pages you create and add to the QLook/Custom folder on the card. The copyright does claim it's partly the work of Phoenix, which is also the BIOS used on those tablet PCs.
@@RaduTek The UFEI can read EFI files from any media, so it's probably working the same way
Apple was one of the original users of EFI as well, just EFI not even UEFI. Old Intel MacBooks have a weird 32bit EFI that nobody else ever used.
Not only that, but It would be amazing if any of the Linux of that time used SystemD instead of the utterly slow SysV stupid interpreted single-threaded scripts.
Linux was really, really bad, its easy to dunk on Windows, but Windows 7 boot was really, really fast, they really fixed their crap after WindowsXP/Vista fiasco.
But by that time Linux also got way better too, really Linux was awful before 2004.
Industrial Design undergrad here: You have simultaneously summed up all my grimmest takeaways from the consumer electronics industry and given a face to all the malaise. Wrestling with questions like "Where can we actually improve here?" keeps me up on the best of days. The answer is almost always: "We already arrived at the ideal solution decades ago and cut off all the corners since." Endlessly frustrating, depressing, yet invigorating (for me) to actually advocate for individual expression and tailored solutions, broad appeal and maximized efficiency be damned. You have an uncanny knack for getting to the bottom of problems in modern product design and putting my curriculum to shame. New designers entering fields with no experience and no historical context don't make better designs, they make hastily thrown-together retreads that lack endurance and sacrifice good, tried-and-true features for trends for trends' sake AND wacky garbage that blindly breaks good convention for no good reason. Sincerely, thank you for singlehandedly dismantling my entire career choice.
I'm sending the last 10 minutes to everyone who asks me why I'm so grumpy about tech because you just articulated what I've been trying to say for like 5 years.
I distinctly remember changing the boot splash of my Windows ME PC to very low quality pictures of Sonic. A turbonerd was born that day.
Mine was Inuyasha. Complete with bad aspect ratio because I guess Windows stretches the image a bit?
Are you me? I had that same splash screen. Did you also send a pic to Bill?
Me and a friend did it in trade school to see if we could trick the teacher into thinking we got a pre release of windows 2000 (we didn't even know 2k was coming out, we just made it up).
@@renakunisaki I guess the image gets displayed in something like 320x200 which doesn't use square pixels
@@renakunisaki Your comment fills me with nostalgia, thank you for this trip down memory lane
This is probably my favorite episode of Quick Start yet, and that rant at the end had me screaming at my computer with joy that finally someone understands my exact struggles with living in today's technological climate. Thoroughly amazing from start to finish, bravo!
amazing video!
I absolutely love the whole "digging closer to hell" vibe that the bit about permission rings gets into, you've got an *incredibly* evocative way of writing / talking about the closer-to-metal aspects of modern computing!
Everything you're saying about Bob Needs A Bonus Logic (tm) I 100% agree with, but the one thing I'm certain of from watching this series is that all the engineers tasked with making these ridiculous things to get Bob his bonus, very likely took up the challenge and tried their damndest to make the best thing they could with the ridiculous limitations placed upon them. If anything, because of the stagnant nature of the PC industry, I bet some of these engineers were even excited to be tasked with coming up with an out of the box idea, even if it was frequently a security hole you could drive a road train through. Every one of these, I've looked at them and gone "This sucked but dammit guys, you tried your best!" and I will at least give kudos for that.
"Manufacturers are shaking up things that are already fine the way they were, simply because Bob needs a bonus." Ahh, enshittification.
Yeah that would be nice. But good luck doing it without 99.9999% of the population dying. Then again I wonder if one could argue that creating a permanent global totalitarian state, which would lock humanity out of anything good ever again, would be worse.
Not quite...enshittification is when a product is made worse to increase profit once you have lock-in and network effects on your side. This is more like...shitty planned obsolescence.
There's a reason our former custodian was using his 1970s-era Hoover vacuum cleaner until the day he retired. It was easy to fix, consumable and service parts were widely available everywhere, and it's solidly made. I think he left behind four or five NIB vacuum cleaners sitting in store room as backups that he never needed. I'm pretty sure he took it home with him when he retired. 😄
(FOR NEW REPLIERS: This was made during the Patreon pre-release!)
Okay. Quick suggestion.
At 32:41, where you do that whole "Welcome to Quick Start" bit, I was expecting some kind of logo cut that completely reframes the last 30 minutes as a cold-open.
After reading the Patreon post the first half of the episode gave what I can only describe as the "vibe callback", "that thing some video games do near the end where they briefly revisit a location/vibe from the start"
That'd be fun if it were doable but it also may be too much, but I figure screw it, I'll throw it out there
(Edit: Ahh, no dice! I think it hits plenty well anyways, I'm glad you found it amusing at least. :) Also means it didn't need a re-edit, which is nice. \o/)
that IS funny and i'll think about it if i find any serious errors that demand a reedit
@@CathodeRayDudeNow I kinda hope you find some errors. Sorry but not sorry :-)
I took it as a ‘The Aristocrats’ hold for shock & awe.
i thought the exact same thing!
To try to be fair, QuickLook has *some* value: When I worked for the government in the late 2000s, our computers were so loaded up with things that it took a full actual 45 minutes to reach a usable state. And we were required to shut down the machine (not sleep, but fully off) every night before going home, so everyone had a full 45 minutes of unproductive time every single morning.
So having a reminder of a meeting coming up in that 45 minute window would actually have been useful.
Genuinely, how on earth is that even physically possible for a machine to take 45 minutes to reach usability
I cannot even fathom what you could be loading and on what grade of hardware would make this even remotely possible. I don't doubt you (especially if it was the late 2000s), that's just difficult to wrap my brain around.
Apart from 45 minutes being too much of an exaggeration or not, I also think a little calendar at start would be cool. But, as mentioned on the video, a modification on the boot screen or, some kinda of wallpaper/widget thingy would be way more simple and reliable. But poor bob wouldn't work for 7 months to get his promotion
@@whatr0mirrored the hd from the network on every boot? something like that. the machines could have been from like 8 years before as well and they might have run like a fully customized version of windows nt 4.0 like a lot of militaries did. edit: 100 computers booting from the same network server at the same time of course wouldn't help
Circa 2000 I had an old Toshiba Tecra 800 laptop. It had a small 4200 RPM hard drive and took over 5 minutes to fully boot Windows 98SE. I upgraded it with a 5400 RPM drive (IIRC 120 gig or so) and the higher areal density plus higher RPM slashed the boot time to 2 minutes.
@@lasskinn474 was mirroring an HD from the network on boot a thing in certain situations? I can kind of see the application of it, but the agony this would inflict on spinning harddisks seems like it would make this completely unfeasible unless you're okay burning through harddrives in a month. Not to mention a thin client setup seems like it would be much more suited to the same use cases.
100 computers booting from the same network server does definitely sound a lot more likely, especially cause government IT is notoriously old and slow.
"If someone were to sneak malware into these components"
Given this laptop was marketed to executives, and all you would need is a JPEG parsing vulnerability in the Daystarter SMM code... I'm sure someone did. Someone who works for a 3 letter agency (or the equivalent in other alphabets)
I'll be completely honest, the entire back half explanation/rant is exactly why I stay in gamedev despite the bullshit. At least it's a _chance_ to work on something novel or new.
Yep. I'm taking a computer science course right now to get into gamedev, because I want to actually do something creative and novel.
The logical extension of this is Unified Kernel Images (UKI) for Linux.
You can now take your Linux kernel and initrd and pack it into a single EFI executable. You can put whatever you want in the initrd, so if you wanted you could have a fully functional graphical Linux system that boots from a single EFI executable.
So essentially Puppy Linux but system.img is bootable?
Pausing the boot process was one of the most horrific computing oddities I have ever seen. It’s bloody sacrilege.
Also these “features” copying personal information into a secondary separate partition is truly stupidly bold because they might easily be leaking encrypted information into clear text. I don’t imagine there is a way for these EFI apps or SMM hacks to read from an encrypted drive, so I can see a scenario where an IT dept sets the puter up with Bitlocker but then the end user enables this feature and bam, encrypted mail and calendar data are now sitting in very inviting XML as clear text, on a FAT32 partition. Now imagine if that computer was stolen, and data leaked, thats an expensive lawsuit time bomb for HP. Not that I wouldn’t enjoy them getting shafted… but it’s such an unnecessary risk both for the customers and the company, it’s mind boggling.
As a thought on how Daystar could have worked, it doesn't *have* to be a heuristic - The Windows Boot Manager loads the OEM logo from a known location in the UEFI ROM. Daystar *could* have used the MMU to hook a debugging interrupt when that location is read, like a regular CPU debugger watching a memory location. When that location is read, the Daystar code gets an interrupt letting them know Windows is displaying it's boot splash, and it can do its interception of the video code, essentially clearing the frame buffer, /dev/null'ing windows' attempts to write to the display, and instead writing its own to the screen instead. I don't know for certain, but it's possible the Windows Boot Manager reads the OEM logo each frame, so the Daystar image keeps being sent until Windows Boot Manager stops trying to display the logo. It's also possible this could be abused by a UEFI by replacing the image at that location each time it's read to make an animated boot logo.
It would also be worth it as a joke trying to read from the OEM splash logo in Windows and seeing if the display corrupts as Daystar tries to overwrite the screen...
This works for UEFI enabled versions of Windows, but Windows 7 was BIOS only, and has to boot in CSM mode, so that image is just being loaded from the hard drive into a spot in kernel memory. However, you're probably not far off base, because speaking to somebody else who knows UEFI better than I do, they proposed that they're hooking a event that fires when the boot process completes, which for reasons I don't fully understand, still applies even to software booting in CSM mode. But again, I didn't fully get it, and we have no idea if that's really what's happening even if it is plausible.
@@CathodeRayDudeif you install Windows 8 or 10 on that laptop, does it show the dot circle while booting?
@@CathodeRayDude A correction: Windows 7 boots fine in UEFI mode and this is how I ran my system for years. The weird bit is it still uses the CSM for video output until the proper drivers load. It's sort of a hybrid setup.
But booting Windows 7 in UEFI mode doesn't help here because it still uses its normal fullscreen animation. Windows 8 was the first version to read the BGRT image.
@@eDoc2020 What I've heard is that they didn't add UEFI support until a *very* late revision, after most people had stopped using it, and that it's a real bodge. I don't know if that's precisely true, but the CSM business sounds pretty likely - and doesn't that mean that if you have the CSM disabled or your board doesn't have one, that it won't work at all?
@@CathodeRayDude UEFI boot was added to 64-bit Vista in one of the service packs, it's always been in 7.
I believe I've read that 7 technically works without the CSM but you'd be running entirely blind until video drivers load. I don't remember if I actually tried this or not. It would definitely be annoying to install drivers blindly and safe mode would become useless.
What an amazing horrifying look into the abyss! Your analogy with the vacuum cleaners was dead on, all modern ones are terrible because making a good one is a solved problem so the only way to "beat" the competition is on price, and you do that by drifting away from the solved ideal through cost cutting and bullshit features designed to hoodwink the consumer (or exploit the financially restricted ones trying to get the most value they can) on buying a terrible product that they will throw out when it breaks in disgust to go buy a different disappointment lured in by its price and hype
Thumbsup here from someone who has stripped down the motor in their vacuum. It could stand to be less loud but is otherwise 'solved' except for some tinkering.
The part about vacuum cleaners scared me quite a lot, as my current vacuum cleaner (which was bought circa 15 years ago) is starting to kick the bucket and I'm about to buy a new one. I hope it's not *that* bad out there in the vacuum cleaners market...
@@real_yanoosh6553Thankfully there are still good vacuum cleaners out there, but you won't find them in any big box store, have to shop online or at a specialty vac/sew&vac store and they'll cost a few hundred dollards instead of just 30. Oreck Miele Sebo and Sanitaire are a few good ones. Personally I have an Oreck I got 10 years ago after a year suffering with a crap shark as we had an Oreck growing up, and amazingly still made in the USA. Pretty much all good vacuums will be bagged models too. But to most consumers the cheap trash bagless ones that marketing has convinced them is somehow better even though it doesn't capture dirt and will be dead in a few years is the face of modern mass market home cleaning, got to keep those purchases coming to pad the bottom line after all
There's still room for improvement, in various ways, noise, size, durability, weight. Brushless motors are a better way to make a vacuum, and you can get excellent ones (anything central, made by Miele, or the Dyson portables) but they are expensive, as top quality stuff has always been. That said, it's less that the best get better, and more that the performance per dollar does.
Cars are a terrible example, they're transformantionally better than they were when I was a child, and that was only 30 years ago. Far more power, reliability, durability, economy, safety, convenience, comfort, the list goes on.
Vacuum cleaners started to compete in sucking power; and it got so ridiculous that EU made a directive to limit the intake power level to 900 W.
I have my Hoover of "2000 W" suck level from maybe 2005 or so. I don't believe it ever actually takes 2kW when operating.
20 years ago HP was bungling Itanium, their, and Intel's, attempt to improve the CPU that didn't work out, it depended on the compiler being able to optimize the code to run as fast as possible with certain instructions bundled together to run at the same time and that compiler didn't happen. It was IA-64. Itanium sank Compaq and SGI, among other companies, which were later bought by HP. EFI was a side effect of that project.
Hey so heres an idea, right? We'll make a CPU with like, who cares, hundred something registers, that all shift around and move every time a different function gets called. But some of the registers are special, like registers that are only a single bit wide to hold a true or a false. Or register is the solely hold a memory location to jump to. Or all of the general purpose registers that are constantly doing the can-can in the middle of being yeeted around in a game of Three card Monte, sure!
But you know would make it even better? Make it so that the processor has to ingest instructions three at a time, those three instructions have to be one of a set template of types because you can't just put any instruction next to any old instruction, and the CPU will execute the instructions in whatever order at once, parallel, out of order, whatever, except in the places where you have explicitly stated a dependency, that are also baked into the type system so those can only be where we have decided they may need to be!
Oh also you have to handle all of the effects of out of order execution yourself. Because trying to do anything with data that was fetched from a speculative load that failed is a processor fault if not done right!
I swear, IA64 really reads like a joke. It's like somebody looked at the concept of an esoteric programming language and just thought "I can do one better" so made an esoteric CPU architecture instead. Except instead of just settling for breaking every common convention that was already established, know what had to go and hate you with the fury of the demons that were harnessed to create the language malbolge, amplified by a factor of 6 and etched into a piece of silicon!
@@teknikal_domain Yeah, I had an idea long ago for a CPU where the instruction set changed after every instruction, really just decrypting the code as it is read and executing the plaintext, but you have to load the key first. A stupid idea, granted.
@@jxh02 just... That's a CPU that runs malbolge 😆
@@teknikal_domain The whole point of Itanium was that all the "bad" complexity of CPU design such as branch prediction and execution ordering is shifted to the compiler. Basically, Itanium was meant to be "more RISC than RISC" where the assembly produced by the compiler is utterly incomprehensive to humans but good for implementing it in hardware. Unfortunately, compilers couldn't produce performant IA64 assembly for normal programs, since runtime behavior can't always be accurately predicted at compile-time, but I trust it made sense in Intel's simulations and microbenchmarks.
Ironically, Intel did the exact opposite with the iAPX 432 some years earlier, aka shifted all the compiler complexity to the CPU to create a "micro-mainframe" that implemented high-level programming language constructs in silicon (and ran dog-slow).
@@Δημήτρης-θ7θ Of all their times they tried to replace x86, the 860/960 was their most profitable.
That whole part of the rant about power is entirely on-point, I bought my laptop a full DECADE ago and other than ditching the failed hard drive for an SSD, it still runs just as well as it did 10 years ago - better, actually, since it came off the line with Windows 8.1 and a 5400rpm drive instead of an unregistered copy of Win10 Pro and a cheap SATA solid-state. It's got an i7 of some generation or other, and a Geforce card of some kind, with 8 gigs of RAM, and that's perfectly cromulent for running everything it did when I bought it.
Similarly, my mid-tier gaming desktop was built 2 years later and other than replacing the failed Western Digital 7200 with yet another cheap SSD upgrade a few years back and throwing an extra stick of RAM in it so I could run Davinci Resolve without thrashing the swap file, it still runs everything including current-gen games at entirely-usable settings. There's really nowhere to go from here, like, I COULD upgrade to a 4k monitor which WOULD need a newer GPU to run games at decent specs and framerates, but why would I do that? It's not like my internet can handle 4k video anyway and 1080p is perfectly fine in a 23" monitor which is the biggest that fits into the shelf alcove of my desk, games run fine at this resolution on the current card, and why spend hundreds of dollars on a monitor that looks very marginally better in very specific circumstances when I can just get another 23" 1080p monitor at Goodwill for less than the price of a Big Mac if this one dies? Hell, I still HAVE several more of these just kinda lying around, I've literally pulled em outta the trash before.
The gains over the last decade or so have been marginal at the best of times and are really just nitpicky things that only apply to you if you're either running $150 Black Friday Special craptops that break a hinge every 6 months and get binned, or are trying to run the newest, bestest AAA game titles at the best possible quality and would rather rebuild your entire PC setup for the price of a runs-and-drives 2008 Nissan Altima instead of just sticking an ex-miner GPU in it or buying a lightly used Playstation 5, both of which would cost about 2 trips to the grocery store once you discover Ebay. Hardware vendors are all pushing the "latest and greatest" when there's really no reason to upgrade, and the sole reason the Big 3 semiconductor companies have stayed afloat THIS long is cause of cryptocurrency scams and this latest AI craze. Hell, the only reason CELL PHONES even need upgraded is cause they stop getting updates, and with modern apps the TLC flash they abuse for the system cache starts to get corrupted after about 3-5 years of hard use, so they just kinda bootloop and die every few years - so you buy another $70 refurbished low-mid-tier phone and run it for another few years.
It could be that personal computers themselves have reached a point of unacceptably diminished returns, but also it could just be that the PC platform itself is holding computing back. Macs abandoned that platform a few years ago and surged ahead in performance, to the point that even PCs that try to emulate its success by switching to ARM are struggling to keep up. Maybe what the industry needs is an end to the forever IBM, and to consider a return to breakaway models like the Amiga line.
This video plus Ross Scott on the first Deus Ex is basically a complete summary of modern society. I never expected that a video about an old video game and a video about an old computer would explain how things are better than anything I’ve ever read, but here we are I guess. Excellent work, Gravis.
When I first saw DayStarter in this video, I thought, "Oh, they customized the boot screen. Kind of weird, and I can see how that might be fragile because you aren't supposed to do that, but it's probably mostly harmless," and I thought about it for a bit and figured that probably the worst thing that might happen is Windows reverting it to the normal boot screen. Then, when you pointed out that it has a user interface later in the video, I swear I shouted "NO!" at the screen. This is somehow even more of an ungodly hack than Phoenix Hyperspace, and all of this just to render a calendar during boot time? Wow. Honestly, I'm shocked anyone even bothered to implement something like this. This clearly took a lot of effort, and I really do have to wonder how fragile it is, but what gets me is that the end result doesn't seem like it would be useful to anyone, especially since it's only on screen for a matter of seconds, and let's face it, I doubt *any* end users ever paused the thing, except perhaps out of curiosity.
On the rant at the end:
Companies like HP competing in a saturated market arent (usually) trying to differentiate themselves by showing you solutions to problems that don't exist. That stuff is just to stand out at trade shows. What they really do is sell you the jellybeans. And a jellybean dispenser. And the jellybean dispenser chute cleaner. And a stale jellybean buyback plan. All from one place so you can set up and manage a hundred jellybean dispensers at your tricounty area pizza time and fun palaces. This why HP and Dell seem to spend 90% of their energy catering to the needs of large businesses. HP and Dell compete by buying up related tech needs to sell to you as a bundle with a discount. This is why Dell bought VMWare, and HP bought uh... everything 😅
I'm honestly astonished that either of them bother selling computers at Best buy anymore. The fact that they've actually turned around on the secondary market and made it their own with their leasing and refurbishing program is one of the most buckwild things in the history of capitalism. There are so few companies that are willing to buy back and then resell their own product, but from what I understand HP and Dell absolutely thrive on it, they probably lease out more computers from 3 years ago than they sell new ones, and the amount they make off of the accessories, the docks and monitors and whatnot, has to be phenomenal. It's why I'm so shocked that they bother trying to make new features like this, when their real business is simply having every executive at every company on speed dial and being the first name they think of when they want 300 new laptops.
Who even buys Hinge Problem DeleteBooks anyway, Latitude and ThinkPad are far superior, or at least ThinkPad was until they started rebadging IdeaPads.
@@CathodeRayDude I work at a very large regional school, I think you north americans would call it a community college. we have like 18,000 students and 2000 staff over several towns and cities. We buy everything from HP. (except printers and phones) since 1995.... Our Pc + laptop registration numbers run in 6 digits and yes , I think we started at 0, since I can trace down about 40,000 of them. I should ask our business controller how much we spend on HP per year, but i don;t know if he is allowed to answer..........
and we have no reason to get HP instead of Dells , it's just tradition, and apparently they never screwed up bad enough for the board of a school directors to pick a new supplier.
@@CathodeRayDude It's the same way I feel about Microsoft's consumer efforts tbh. We've all seen their investor calls; all the money comes from them being the first and only company that gets considered when an enterprise needs operating systems and office suites for a fleet of 10,000 machines.
@@pocketpc_ What baffles me is that coasting on a reputation only works for so long. Eventually, it'll give out. What's their plan then?
I've observed repeatedly of late that new versions of Windows have become increasingly bad at "being Windows" - getting out of the user's way and letting them use their computer. That's what I've always heard from non-techies regarding why they continued to use Windows: it doesn't get in the way enough to make learning a different OS worthwhile. But now, bringing up Windows around the average user will probably just draw a litany of complaints about random reboots, clicking on things opening random Edge windows, etc.
And yet, there's still no built in utility to bulk rename files based on a pattern in Windows. There sure is in Linux Mint, though. Not sure about Mac, but I wouldn't be surprised either way.
This isn't a threat to Microsoft's market share today, really. But as the video mentioned, Windows 11 failed to trigger a software refresh. Clearly, Windows' reputation has declined from "We always have to be on the latest version" to "When we get new OSs, we get Windows". If Windows 12 fails to do so as well, then Microsoft will have a serious problem on their hands.
15:30: OK, I got one for you. Literally every spotty or nonexistent data connection ever, be it airplane mode to being in a Faraday cage of a cavernous concrete building, to "I just don't have a dataplan because I'm in Nebraska and nobody has signal in Nebraska if they're not not on wifi" situations. And this is a pet peeve of mine: ALL PHONE APPS MUST WORK RELIABLY OFFLINE just feels obvious. "Synchronize shit, even if it's hard" is something POP3 clients did, so I'm not super interested in excuses when a fediverse client or navigation app or chat program can't do it. Cool, give me what you already got, let me queue up stuff so it goes out later, do what you can when you get a connection in the background.
I can't even check my TH-cam watch history without an active connection.
As someone who has worked in the industry for a long time. (been working on computers since 1989) You are 100% correct with your assessment. The only thing pushing "innovation" for these manufactures. Is middle management looking for some edge for a buck. Solving problems that don't exist just so they have something to show. Now software and hardware makers they have room to grow but your are also correct that the updates and change we get are very minor from year to year. Unless your doing something super heavy a computer from 5 years ago is going to run almost everything.
mbox-over-xml is by itself at least 60% of the total hell-world quota of this entire video.
"There are good engineers at HP." Yeah, in the "write viruses for ink cartridges so we can force people to subscribe to get new ones every month" department.
Good or lawful evil? I'd argue that a good engineer would later be lauded in something akin to "The Story of Mel". Like, "non-genuine" ink would make the printer work better and nobody would be able to figure out how to reverse his hack.
I agree with you that why I will never buy a new HP color printer !
@@richardbrobeck2384 I'll never buy HP. Brother makes good laser printers for now…
No, not those ones.
For what it's worth I would quite happily listen to you just grumbling about daft trends in capitalism but the computer stuff is also welcome too!
You do have me wondering if we'll ever get to a point where the "innovation" obsession just dies and as a society we can just make stuff we know works and is reliable and good at what it does, and ideally doesn't need replacing every five minutes, and find literally anything else to do with our lives except work to make and sell disposable crap so we can afford to buy disposable crap.
Does seem like a very post-capitlist thing though, hard to imagine it happening as things are now.
We already tried that. Companies that make good products go out of business.
On the rant at the end - my home lab virtual machine server is a laptop from 2011.
It was a high-end laptop, sure. And it has maxed RAM and dual SSDs from 2017. But at its heart, it’s a laptop from 2011. Heck, its CPU wasn’t even seriously outmatched until 2018. It’s one of the earliest quad core laptops, but quad core was still as good as you could get in a laptop until pretty recently, and is still perfectly normal.
And it does its job great. It runs 4-6 VMs of various OSes at the same time, including some RAM-intensive stuff.
If it wasn’t for games, my primary Windows desktop would still be a Core 2 Quad with Radeon 5000-series.
Interesting, what laptop is this?
@@xmlthegreat ThinkPad W701ds
I actually still use a old zBook G2 with broken gpu as a hypervisor for stuff like netware and nt4
Same thing here. My newest homelab machine runs a Ryzen 1700X. Everything else is from the Intel Skylake dark ages like my 6700T and 5775C machines. They work perfectly fine. They are all capable of being completely usable windows machines if I wanted them to be. Instead they run things like a Minecraft server with an obscene amount of RAM for one and the most tortured NAS of all time (3 consecutive drive deaths in a month).
@@AnonymousFreakYTmy my main laptop is a maxed out Thinkpad W530 from 2012 and it’s still kicks ass. Have no need to upgrade because it still does everything that I want fast enough to not be worth upgrading. (Excluding the graphics performance, that’s the one thing that it sucks at compared to todays machines)
Oh, it's an *abomination*, I love it! These things you're digging up are like the cryptids of software
Man.. you explaining HP DayStarter brought me more joy and laughs than most modern comedy. thank you. I love this series with all my heart. I remember a lot of these machines as they were in use while I was working in PC Sales/Service, these features were always fascinating to me.
I loved the rant at the end. Probably my favorite Quick Start video yet.
And now we have the full circle of dystopia with planned obsolescence. Batteries was the "killer app" for getting to sell more so hey! Lets glue them stuck in our devices, cars etc. The latest Walkman moment was the iPhone moment. And then they just did more of the same. Great video BTW.
I loudly screamed “No!” When you mentioned SMM. Also, I understand the reason such a thing exists but the concept of something that can override the kernel and ignore NMIs is vaguely terrifying.
Bravo. Absolutely wonderfully essential rant. This applies to almost everything made in the last 5-10 years. It's all been done, and somebody just wants to see more spit polish on plastic.
I know a method to pause the boot process in theory, and it's one you can even do on a MOS 6502 (I should know, because I've written code to explicitly do this on a MOS 6502). I'm not saying this is what HP did, but it's the first thing springs to my mind.
Windows is taking over the processor to boot. When you pause you will be halting the processor; straight up issuing a BRK instruction. However, day planner will be running in an interrupt and even if the main processor task is halted an interrupt being triggered will still cause the program pointer to jump to the interrupt code, execute, and return from interrupt to it's halted state. To resume, just tell the processor to continue execution.
Have you ever seen your computer completely lock up but you can still move the mouse cursor? Same thing. Mouse input is handled via an interrupt and the operating system scheduler outside of interrupt has halted the processor.
EDIT: HA! I should've just watched the video for a couple extra minutes. Yup! It's running in interrupt (SMI). If there is enough evidence out there to say it *might* be running in interrupt, then it absolutely is running in interrupt.
EDIT 2: My Managing Director literally said to the development team "we need to introduce AI into our marketing" and everyone, even the CTO, died a little inside. It's why every website and product in less than a few months now has "AI!" on the proverbial box; Artificial Intelligence doesn't exist, especially the way people envision it and that is VERY true of almost any company who slaps it all over their website. When you type in that search box, you aren't invoking some magical AI, you're contacting AWS Elastisearch, which is the Amazon implementation of Elastisearch that first came out in 2010, which itself is based on Lucene that came out in 1999, which is based on the Vector Space Model first described in *1962*. The first iPhone came out in 2007 and (at least consumer) technology since then has been profoundly boring. We've reached the end-game.
I do get lock ups like this, relatively often, and I have never thought it'd be anything to do with this. I just assumed it was just a Windows thing. interesting, thank you.
HP also made 11.6" models of some of their line-up and they were the only netbooks worth using, because they at least had U-suffix core processors and not those lousy atom things, which had less processing power than a clipped toe nail.
The HP EliteBook 2710p and 2730p touchscreen laptops with the twisty screen had them. They used to give pretty good performance for the battery life.
@@GojiraX I believe i had the 2170p at around 10 years ago, but without the touchscreen.
The only problem i had with it was the really awful LCD TN panel. The colours were completely out of whack, the viewing angles 0° and contrast nonexistent. I saw laptops in the 90's which did much better.
But HP was not alone. In the late 2000's/early 2010's a lot of other more expensive laptop manufacturers did this.
I was glad when i at some point, when i was still at TU munich got a student discount for a 14" laptop with a proper IPS panel.
@@hyperturbotechnomikeThey had options for 768p IPS, but TN was default.
@@dustojnikhummer I don't remember if this configuration was sold where i live. Only saw the awful TN panel ones. In my eyes inexcusable, because it wasn't a cheap machine. When looking at a slightly off angle, black turned into green. When i met my SO at university, it became impossible to watch a movie or study together.
There were compatible IPS panels being sold on eBay by CN vendors few years later.
But as said, HP wasn't alone. The ThinkPad base models at this came with similar rubbish panels, worse than what they sold 20 years ago.
There were some amd versions of those laptops. They'd give an atom a run for it's money in slowness. The only redeeming quality is the graphics being better what Intel shipped at that time.
47:18 I think what happens at that point is that competition starts making up issues, consumers get a worse product than before until someone realizes "how about we just make a damn vacuum cleaner that just sucks?" and the cycle repeats. I believe we're in an intermediary stage when it comes to consumer laptops, where they don't really include insane features anymore and manufacturers are slowly but surely gonna start making good, solid laptops again(I'm thinking old ThinkPad quality and upgrade-ability and shit).
What a wild ride, and as you said at the end, we hardly looked at the PC at all!
I am in the lower-middle of "knowing things about computers" and when you said it pauses the boot process, I shook in fear.
Is this more or less heinous than running 2 OS-es at once in separate halves of ram?
More heinous, since this is an active process - the worst thing Hyperspace can do is crash your machine, not cause continuous ongoing memory corruption
@@CathodeRayDudeIf I were the engineer that got foisted on the grenade of having to write this gawd-awful malware, I'd try to do some sort of belt, suspenders, skyhooks and staples approach to ensuring it never ran past the startup. Hell, I'd throw in an absolute maximum time limit before exiting, just to be sure it at least reached a desktop if every other possibility failed.
So I guess the real question is, are the engineers at HP (and more importantly their managers) any good?
@@oasntet absolutely. there are ways to keep this from being an *eldritch* horror, just a regular one... and we have no idea if they took any of them. Chilling
Learning that rings below ring zero exist is like one of those iceberg memes, except it's existentially terrifying.
It goes deep as hell too. I'm a hardware engineer for Intel. We have a running joke that the lowest ring is the engineer manually smacking bits into instruction cache. We have specialized boards that can tell the CPU to just stop. Not do nothing for the next N cycles, but hard stop. 0hz kind of stop. It just stays in whatever state until we tell it to go again. The Turing machine tape moves when and how we tell it to. A chip so fast it does addition in the time it takes light to go from your light bulb to the floor can be reduced to an 8086 with the right set of jumpers.
This is absolutely Prime CRD. You have really taken me on an emotional journey with your perfectly executed rant. Keep up the great work, sir!
Your last theory made me realize that's the very reason my laptop CPU was frying itself while gaming. For some years now it has been the a normal thing having auto overclock on certain conditions like load, temperature limits, power draw, battery and so on. Is it really necessary? Not really, but sometimes a speed bump is appreciated and that's how turbo modes came to be.
But it has been out of control lately and following your theory I assume is because Bob needs to show every year how much bester they can make Asus laptops in this case. And more GHZs mean more speed and more speed means bester laptop, so they activate turbo mode by default with a super aggresive profile that goes beyond the CPU maker recomendations even if it's within spec but also you can't disable or tinker it in the BIOS because the Apple brainworm has infected every hardware maker.
Sometimes a saint appears and codes a program that lets you manage power states and voltages through Windows, but I couldn't find any for my laptop configuration. So I had to add a value in the registry to unlock a hidden config in energy setting to disable Windows from turboing the CPU when what I really wanted was to control the temp limit and do some undervolting. At least my CPU doesn't go to 90Cº anymore because of D2R and stays at a comfy 70º.
Thanks Asus, I hate it.
Love that Capstone shirt. They are the pinnacle of computer entertainment 😂
I love the wording of "this is a bad way to use the computer, dont do it"
These series never cease to amaze me with how much work and imagination is put into making these trivial and useless features work, and then they seem to faceplant on the finish straight. I feel many of them could be made pretty usable with a bit more polishing and features on the software itself, but it feels like they are shipped as a proof of concept and then immediately forgotten. It's like going through the effort of engineering a whole car and then only adding the controls for driving backwards and turning left.
"Look like the box for a GeForce 4"
*shows the box for a radeon card*
Masterful gambit sir
32:27 I gasped audibly and clutched my hand to my chest in shock, horror, and disgust.
Had to pause in order to comment; now eagerly(?) looking forward to the explanation of this atrocity!
Update: 37:27 I let out an "oh, f$ck..." because I know *exactly* what that means. Wow.
Good god was this a terrific video, fell off my chair with those reveals. And with that final speech I think you hit the nail on the head so well. I've come to the same conclusion about smartphones four years ago: we have managed to produce SoCs that can do everything one user could ask for, but they get deprecated and replaced by overkill shit, while most people that can't afford a >300 usd handset will have to buy literal landfill, which chips that were outdated from the moment they were fabbed. It's living in a cuckoo world to have companies touting sustainability and climate targets while producing so much utter waste, and it's not like making products that were worth it was that much higher; they would really just shoot themselves in the face if they didn't have a promised upgrade cycle.
Though we see the post "USP" world in automotive already today. Corporate consolidations and agreed upon platform-sharing, on top of (as you stated) most of the work being done by parts OEMs (BOSCH designed most of the Fiat 500e, by the way) makes every car even less distinctive than before. An Opel, Dodge, Alfa Romeo, Chrysler, or Peugeot can share the same whole stuff underneath, with a bunch of parts developed 20 years ago, because developing different stuff for each model would be prohibitively expensive due to emissions constraints. And so much of the complexity goes away with the move to EVs. So the entire play now is connected vehicles, subscription services, and leasing. Welcome to hell
I don't know what it says about me that I was like, oh yeah, you could do that with SMM when you showed that you could press a key. I don't know why I wasn't immediately horrified until you pointed out how absolutely horrifying it is :)
I didn't even know about SMM etc. before this but when I saw that it was interactable *during boot* I was like "what!? How is that possible... It shouldn't be, right? What the actual fuck!? Modifying a bootsplash, that's easy... but it being interactive... how in the fuck".."
I think that's the difference between "recognizing that something is possible" and "realizing that it was actually done"
DayStarter is quite possibly the most cursed computer program I've ever seen
This video turning into 15 minutes on how capitalism is literally backwards at the end made me very happy
@@Δημήτρης-θ7θonly problem is that’s something that happened in the late 2000’s, any time after that (plus or minus a few years) has been just spinning wheels going nowhere and unsolving previously solved problems. (The entire electronics industry is guilty of this, especially since the late 2010’s onwards)
Just for the "y tho?" end rant alone, this has become one of my favorite tech videos ever. But the rest of the video is peak Quick Start already, so really this is just peak CRD
I am actually shooketh! I honestly never knew the Ring-3 and Ring -2 existed, no wonder Spectre/Meltdown and all following other shite exists. But daaaang. Also have to add (new sub) love the channel, someone's as passionate about old computers as me! :D
This is like my WearOS watch that shows the time during bootup, but it boots up so fast that this is only visible for a second before the actual UI gets shown.
Also, if you are wondering what HP engineers do nowadays, I've recently seen their new full-sized desktop keyboard. They removed the scroll lock light, removed the right windows button (and made the right alt, menu and right ctrl very wide), and did some moving around of the print screen, scroll lock and pause keys to confuse people.
yeah, basically create a solution, to a problem that never existed.
In terms of the time in the boot screen, my guess is that was from an engineer trying to debug a problem with the clock being wrong on boot much earlier when the boot process took far longer, so having access to the watch time before it finished booting was immensely useful so he wasn't spending as much time waiting for the watch to boot.
And once the watch shows you the time whole booting... why are you going to take literally any time at all to remove a feature, even one that's preeminently useless? You have to replace it with something, and anything you can replace it with is, at best, exactly as useful. Might as well leave it alone, you have real problems to fix.
At least that's what it feels like to me, I've added start up features to programs for debugging sake that got left in because I didn't have anything better to replace them with.
Right Windows is not a key on mechanical keyboards either (not that one needs more than one 'Super' key). It was replaced by the 'Fn' key, used as a modifier for keyboard functions (usually media keys).
Windows lock can be a useful, though.
@@Code7Unltd On your mechanical keyboard maybe. There's so much variation in key layouts in that market that any blanket statement is categorically impossible.
The second you said "dot ee eff eye" I screamed and threw my phone because I realized *HP created a GUI EFI binary mail spooler*. The horror.
(Technically EFI binaries aren't OSes as they don't have a kernel. MS-DOS does/did.)
Edit/Update: OK now you're talking about them putting it in the SMM and I'm crying, I'm suing for emotional damages
Thank you so much for just being great.Being the way you are with these long videos about the most obscure tech no one would care about .Yet I do watch them,thnks to you.
Wish I could give you more, but I'll check in more often when I can 🙏🏽✊🏽🖖🏾
That 2nd theory at the end and rant about technology was absolutely priceless. Hats off my brother, spit yo shit indeed 💪
"Put it system management mode" lolololol.... I knew the email thing was EFI from the get go but I never would have imagined someone doing a full program of any kind in SMM.
"I'm sorry this video ended up being an hour of me talking-"
THAT'S WHY WE'RE HERE, GRAVIS. THAT'S WHY WE WATCH YOUR VIDEOS. TO HEAR YOU TALK FROM A POSITION OF EXPERIENCE AND RESEARCH.
Seriously. Length is nothing to apologize for as long as you actually have something to say.
About 10-15 years ago I worked in sales for a telecommunications company and my guess with these quickstart things was that it was the sales reps (and the people selling to them) that pushed for these features so they would have something to demo that was unique. I'm basing this on a having a rep from a laptop company (it might have been HP I don't remember) demo a quickstart system to me and my fellow sales reps at a work thing.
I've been needing a way to burn an hour while waiting for my guitar to arrive in the mail, so this was possibly the best way to do so, because it actually kept my attention for the entirety of said hour.
Absolutely love your videos. One the best on TH-cam. The quick start series is becoming one my favorites on your channel
this past month(or thereabouts) has seen so many uploads from you, it's exciting! my husband and I usually get really excited & wait to watch your videos with each other, it's been pretty sweet getting one once a week honestly
also, the FUCKING PINNACLE of youtube entertainment
That end rant was lovely. I am REALLY enjoying this series, its really something special. Thanks for making it!
I’ve been struggling to articulate my feelings on the state of technology, but your end rant captures it exactly
This had me on the edge of my seat. I kept trying to picture what absolutely criminal thing they had to be doing to pull this off and I just couldn’t. The reveal was horror-movie-esque, well done.
I don't know the exact mechanism, but my understanding is there is a standardized way for UEFI code to check whether the OS has completed booting so watchdog timers can be setup to reset the machine in the case the OS fails to boot. So it's probably less fragile than you're thinking.
I can almost imagine this as an scene from Star Trek: "Captain, I have something here." "What is it lieutenant?" "No... it can't be... it's running directly off the motherboard." "You're saying it's running alongside the bios?" "No, sir. It IS the bios" (MUSICAL STINGER, CUT TO COMMERCIAL)
I love the timeskip music, did you make it yourself? It's like the perfect Adlib snare / bass combo, so relatable
yup, composed it in adlib tracker. some day I'll finish it and release it, haha.
@@CathodeRayDudeI wouldn‘t mind this playing every time my computer boots, if only there were some way of making it do that… oh wait
The first time I realized how different UEFI was is when I had to compile some diagnostics software to troubleshoot a broken TPM. Wild stuff when you consider how badly things can go. Great video, as always.
the talk about features takes my back to my 2011 thinkpad, which had a bright blue button on the keyboard titled "Thinkvantage". all it did was interrupt the boot process and give you a list with shortcuts to the system setup and a temporary boot menu. I used this button a lot because I dualbooted on that laptop and it was easier then trying to figure out how to add both windows and linux to a boot manager.
this is one of your best episodes yet holy shit. i was CAPTIVATED, man. the writing, the line delivery; just, wow.
"Bob is in hell, and he's making it your problem."
The corporate world in a nutshell.
I figured when you hit pause that there was some level of hijacking going on but holy shit that's bad.
Hey, I think you're really being unfair to executives; they don't just run Outlook. They also schedule and "run" dozens of meetings that serve no purpose and *could* be an email. Frankly, I *wish* all they did was run Outlook.
You'll be pleased to note that the preroll ad for this video was for Dyson