Funny I think

Story: Windows better off closed, says MicrosoftTotal Replies: 7
Author Content
techiem2

Mar 10, 2008
12:14 PM EDT
I especially liked:

Quoting:In Hilf's opinion, there'd be no reason to open source Microsoft's code other than for an "interesting press article".


By which I interpret that to mean that there'd be no reason to open the code that benefits MS. Imagine what the wine group could do with the full windows source code... Imagine some foss hackers taking the windows code, cleaning it up, and releasing a stable, secure, fast release of windows (what MS has been unable to do with years of development and millions of dollars)... I can't imagine that making MS or their shareholders very happy....
rijelkentaurus

Mar 10, 2008
12:47 PM EDT
Quoting: Imagine what the wine group could do with the full windows source code...


Post it to one of those comedy sites...
Sander_Marechal

Mar 10, 2008
1:25 PM EDT
Hehe yeah. TheDailyWTF would have *years* worth of new material!
moopst

Mar 11, 2008
6:41 PM EDT
Way back in '92 I saw a video (tape even!) of some contest set up as a Hollywood Squares game that had Bill Gates in one of the squares. The moderator asked a question about an obfuscated C code contest to a French guy in another square. I think it was "What was the name of the contest" and he said "Windows", then the camera went to Bill who was obviously chagrined. The best part was his pronunciation, "Weendows".
phsolide

Mar 12, 2008
10:01 AM EDT
Hilf is so, so... full of it.

Take a gander at a *1997* Usenix panel session: http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/useni...

Look about halfway-down for "PANEL SESSION" and "Do You Need Source ?". Read George Candea's notes of the discussion. They're really quite illuminating, in this context. Back in '97, Werner Vogels wanted to be the King NT Guru. Now, he's at Google. Brian Bershad, even in '97, was an "Anything but Unix" guy. As I recall, he was an ex-Mach developer, who hated the fork() system call.

In fact, that whole page is amusing, 11 years later. They were still pretending that NT would be portable to some RISC CPUs. They were still pretending that developers could be *more productive* under NT than under Unix. Butler Lampson gave a talk titled "Operating System Security Meets the Internet". In light of what we know now about NT 3.51, NT 4.0, Windows 2000 and Windows XP, SP2, it's obvious that there was (and maybe still is) a HUGE disconnect between the MSFT developers, and the Real World of the Internet.
Abe

Mar 12, 2008
11:42 AM EDT
Quoting:They were still pretending that NT would be portable to some RISC CPUs.


NT was ported to run on Digital Alpha processor, which was a RISC processor. I ran NT on multiple Alpha server with Digital Cluster for NT too.

phsolide

Mar 12, 2008
12:01 PM EDT
And I ran Red Hat 4.0 on a DEC "UDB" in 1997/98. I believe NT 4.0 technically supported PowerPC CPUs, in little-endian mode.

Big deal. You couldn't get a whole lot of Windows software for the Alpha-based machines, and they ran in 32-bit compatibility mode, not 64-bit mode.

Yes, MSFT "supported" a few (little-endian) CPUs other than x86, but the "support" was window dressing at best.
tracyanne

Mar 13, 2008
9:32 PM EDT
One thisng I can tell you about the future of Windows, is that it will be Vista and then some. I've seen the videos.

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