51–60 of 485 posts
Forgeting about legality for a moment, this is great. Windows XP is probably the greatest operating system if you factor usability and how many people it has reached. It was also from a time where people still did not expect proprietary operating systems to be actively working against you. So it's great that this source will not be forever lost.
Forgeting about legality for a moment, this is great. Windows XP is probably the greatest operating system if you factor usability and how many people it has reached. It was also from a time where people still did not expect proprietary operating systems to be actively working against you. So it's great that this source will not be forever lost.
> proprietary operating systems to be actively working against you Where is this happening ? Are we expecting this now ? What did I miss
macOS ... Is special. Some of the most notable changes in the last few years have been to try to restrict what an app can do.
Forgeting about legality for a moment, this is great. Windows XP is probably the greatest operating system if you factor usability and how many people it has reached. It was also from a time where people still did not expect proprietary operating systems to be actively working against you. So it's great that this source will not be forever lost.
Even then my use of Windows was low. I now have no need for it at all. From what I've heard Windows 10 is not in the same class.
Forgeting about legality for a moment, this is great. Windows XP is probably the greatest operating system if you factor usability and how many people it has reached. It was also from a time where people still did not expect proprietary operating systems to be actively working against you. So it's great that this source will not be forever lost.
> proprietary operating systems to be actively working against you Where is this happening ? Are we expecting this now ? What did I miss
Forgeting about legality for a moment, this is great. Windows XP is probably the greatest operating system if you factor usability and how many people it has reached. It was also from a time where people still did not expect proprietary operating systems to be actively working against you. So it's great that this source will not be forever lost.
Nostalgia is, it seems, a hell of a drug.
Then Vista came along and people said XP was the good one.
My immediate thought is whether researchers or investigative journalists will find cold hard US government backdoors. This is potentially big.
They won't. Such backdoors would have to be hidden from Joe Average Coder at Microsoft first and foremost. Coding for MS is not a livelong thing, you know? So any backdoor would a) be obfuscated and b) have some form of plausible deniability. If I would have to make them, they would look like strings of two or three bugs.
Also, it's not just (allegedly) all of XP source that's been leaked:
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/microsoft/the-windows-...
It's also Windows Server 2003, MS DOS 3.30, MS DOS 6.0, Windows 2000, Windows CE 3, Windows CE 4, Windows CE 5, Windows Embedded 7, Windows Embedded CE, Windows NT 3.5, and Windows NT 4!
That's a huge amount of stuff to analyse.
Forgeting about legality for a moment, this is great. Windows XP is probably the greatest operating system if you factor usability and how many people it has reached. It was also from a time where people still did not expect proprietary operating systems to be actively working against you. So it's great that this source will not be forever lost.
> proprietary operating systems to be actively working against you Where is this happening ? Are we expecting this now ? What did I miss
Automatic updates on reboot. For example when someone giving a presentation or class has to restart their computer for some reason (quite common in Windows still, or one just ran out of power). Boot up the computer, people waiting impatiently - and then have to wait for 5-30 minutes for the computer to finish updates before being able to use it. No way to cancel/post-pone, no time-estimates for when it will be done.
My immediate thought is whether researchers or investigative journalists will find cold hard US government backdoors. This is potentially big.
Besides, probably the quality was still low enough that you didn't need this, there were plenty of bugs that would grant a big organisation access.
I still keep my 12 year old legal copy of Windows XP available to be run as a VM via VirtualBox for occasions when I need to try out some Windows/DOS stuff - works pretty well :)
Not sure why you got downvoted (too off-topic? no idea), because this is imo actually a rather interesting point. And 'pretty well' feels like an understatement when it comes to performance (or at least snappiness): I have XP on a VM for a while just for software which didn't support 7. Despite being in a VM (VirtualBox), the thing feels snappier and faster than current day desktop OS (XFCE on Ubuntu, Windows 10, OSX…