Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Windows XP source code has leaked

gizmodo.com.au

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

421–430 of 485 posts

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#421

Post by fogihujy »

sitkack wrote: post #420
hnlmorg wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XP, when it was first released, was a more resource hungry and uglier version of Windows 2000. Win 2000 was amazing when it was released. Games (albeit not DOS ones) worked well, it was stable and really your only other options were worse (Mac OS 9 was less stable than Win 98, ME was a dumpster fire, Linux wasn't quite ready for the desktop and BeOS was awesome but barely supported). Then when XP was released, it had…

Funny that, because Win2k was a glossy, less stable version of WinNT 4 that we had to move to, to get USB support. Had USB been backported to NT4, I never would have moved.

Did you run any specific hardware or something? W2k was rock solid for me from RC2 and onwards. The only thing that really didn't run stable was the drivers for Via's crappy chipset, and they released improved drivers fairly quickly.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#422

Post by rightbyte »

ksk wrote: post #335
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #298

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People cannot be trusted to upgrade. It REALLY IS good to force people to upgrade. The very idea that users should be at the mercy of their computers instead of the other way around is contrary to the concept of personal computing. People like you are why I hate IT these days. You seem to think that because you have some specialized knowledge about computers that you're smarter than everyone who doesn't. You're tot…

I fully understand the frustration after seeing people having their computers reboot in the middle of presentations and other important events. That's why they made multiple products. Consumer OS = you don't want to be the sysadmin of the computer. Enterprise/LTSB OS = do what you want.

I still get forced reboots on my workplace Win10 laptop. I can just postpone the update like 4 weeks. And then stuff brake.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#423

Post by wpdev_63 »

jeroenhd wrote: post #272
maxpert wrote: post #270

Good ReactOS developers don’t have to guess anymore. They can use this code as a reference and build their own version better than hasty M$ Devs.

No. If any maintainer of ReactOS evne just opens the source code, the entire project is doomed to get killed by lawyers. The Win2k source code has been leaked before, as have several WinNT sources. These leaks pose more risks to projects like ReactOS and Wine than they benefit.

How would they know that they "opens the source code"? How would they prove that in a court of law that they didn't reverse engineer it? Seems very fishy to me....

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#424

Post by rightbyte »

gigel82 wrote: post #354
pmontra wrote: post #296

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A friend of mine uses his PC only in the weekends (he uses the company's PC during the week) and hates Windows because every time it takes hours to download and install updates over his slow ADSL (I think there is no fast Internet there.) He has to remember to turn the PC on in the morning to use it in the afternoon. If he forgets, next weekend. Of course he could turn it on Friday night but the user experience is st…

That makes no sense, I never had Windows block waiting to download updates and not let me use the computer.

It swamps the connection.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#425

Post by james-skemp »

hnlmorg wrote: post #411
i_am_proteus wrote: post #264

Earlier quoted context omitted.

XP also shipped with the 2000 skin and it was trivially easy to switch over.

It was easy to switch but there is a lot to be said for sane defaults. With each new iteration of Windows I'd find more and more insane defaults (for me at least). It started with file extensions being hidden by default. Then system files too. By the time XP was released I was finding that I had to spend an hour just configuring the system how I liked...and that was before I installed any software. Users will sometim…

Windows Server having file extensions turned off by default still drives me crazy. I get it for the desktop versions, but it would be fantastic if server editions had it on, or it saved and picked up the toggle from your AD account/profile.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#426

Post by loa_in_ »

parliament32 wrote: post #343
rbinv wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would love to see the actual compile/build process for this. I don't think we'll see bootable ISOs (from this).

"tools\razzle offline" sets up the environment "buildx /z" "postbuild" should make an iso

Does razzle dazzle contain any easter eggs?

I can't spare mobile bandwidth to try this out, otherwise I would happily poke around myself.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#427

Post by skee0083 »

christophilus wrote: post #257
Piskvorrr wrote: post #246

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. When saying "XP was great", people mean "XP SP2 and on" - for me, the move from W2k to WXP was "the same thing, now with Fischer-Price aesthetic!"

> Fischer-Price aesthetic That is the perfect description. It’s one of the ugliest UIs I’ve ever experienced.

I have to stick up for XP because i have so many fond memories from my young adulthood of using it. I never had a problem with it's default theme but it also shipped with a few other themes that were better. like olive and then later the zune theme which was arguably the best one.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#429

Post by srtjstjsj »

sumtechguy wrote: post #283
xyproto wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then Windows 7 came along and nobody said Vista was the good one.

7 was just rebranded vista. It was basically vista sp3. MS knew the vista name had been badly tarnished. The are several reasons why vista churned so badly at startup was the indexing service and the service that was trying to load everything into memory. Turn those 2 off and vista worked as good as 7, I did this to dozens of computers and the owners were so happy. Several other background services needed about 1.5GB…

Whether you call it an SP or not, Windows 7 rolled back the UI mess of Vista.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#430

Post by jeroenhd »

wpdev_63 wrote: post #423
jeroenhd wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No. If any maintainer of ReactOS evne just opens the source code, the entire project is doomed to get killed by lawyers. The Win2k source code has been leaked before, as have several WinNT sources. These leaks pose more risks to projects like ReactOS and Wine than they benefit.

How would they know that they "opens the source code"? How would they prove that in a court of law that they didn't reverse engineer it? Seems very fishy to me....

If they did, Microsoft sues, and the programmer is asked under oath, everyone knows. Unless the programmer decides to lie under oath, which will only make matters worse eventually.

If they claim they just reverse engineered the code, they're in an equal amount of trouble. Reverse engineering is illegal in many jurisdictions, unless you manage to do it in a very specific way which should still results in different code than what Microsoft wrote.

The more source code leaks, the harder it becomes to claim plausible deniability. Ethically, I think that's wrong and should be fixed, but the copyright and software protection law is against compatibility projects like these when it comes to legislation.

Post reply on HN