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Windows XP source code has leaked

gizmodo.com.au

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Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#291

Post by reflectiv »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #258
oblio wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The telemetry is shady but the automatic updates are a... necessary evil. People would delay updates for MONTHS by clicking that postpone button. Windows is by design meant to be used by not very computer literate people and unfortunately these kinds of users need to be forced to do the right thing sometimes. As they said back in the day: "the user will do everything possible to see the dancing bears, including downl…

Da, it is for your own good comrade! I really wish people who insist on claiming some right to control how users use their own computers would leave IT forever.

And if it were left open ended at the request of people like you...we'd still have compromised systems out there spread amongst normal people as well as within infrastructure and other more critical pieces of hardware.

People cannot be trusted to upgrade. It REALLY IS good to force people to upgrade.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#292

Post by speeder »

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…

Windows 7 STILL does this in fact.

I am currently using Windows 7 in my personal machine (and Linux in others).

The indexing service often gets disabled because it makes the machine slow down a lot.

Also I really miss Linux "swapyness", Windows Vista+ (10 included) are really aggressive in swapping, more than needed, often my machine ended trashing because of Swap while still having 20+ GB free, this is in part because of that stupid indexing and cache, Windows 7 has a habit of giving priority to the cache, putting files from the most accessed programs in the RAM, and not caring if your CURRENT program need RAM...

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#293

Post by pmontra »

Hackbraten wrote: post #81
jononor wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of user data collected in Windows 10 for example. Next to no user benefits, just value extracted for Microsoft. 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 compu…

Unpopular opinion but: telemetrics help developers prioritize stuff and triage bugs. From a user’s point of view, isn’t that a substantial benefit?

Crash reports usually yes (but how to prevent receiving personal data from stack dumps?), features selection probably not. The reason is that you don't get data from the people who disable telemetry and they could use different features. You must find them, poll them and merge the results with what telemetry gives you. If you don't do that, telemetry is detrimental to those people.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#294

Post by ripdog »

moshimoshir wrote: post #158

On this note, does anyone know where to legally obtain windows xp, hopefully for cheap ? I should note that I've tried at multiple places and none seemed fine so kindly speak from experience. (Or sell me your own, I'd trust anyone here).

Why, if you don't mind my asking?

Even if you paid anything for such an old product, your money wouldn't be going to MS anyway. Not sure what difference it makes, paying for an abandoned product.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#295

Post by csharptwdec19 »

saagarjha wrote: post #117
dgellow wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both ReactOS and Wine are open sourced, Microsoft engineers and lawyers look at their code. That's not a hypothetical situation, it happened in the past, the most recent news event on this was: https://www.theregister.com/2019/07/03/reactos_windows_resea... . With the risk of copyright infringement you want to be sure that you're taking active measures to defend your position in case you're facing legal charges.

(Usually projects of this sort will make you guarantee that you have not been influenced by the closed-source code they are trying to clean room.)

Yeah, I actually once worked at a place that was clean-rooming. They went to absurd lengths, even WITHOUT the old source code.

If you were designing the new app you couldn't even -look- at the existing UI; you could only get descriptions. Every term was checked by legal to make sure that it was a 'standard' industry term vs something that was specific to the existing software. They even used a different tech stack wherever they could.

I think the other company still tried to sue, IDK how it played out (I was gone by then) but I remember at least thinking they were in a pretty safe spot with how they handled it.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#296

Post by pmontra »

dx034 wrote: post #132
bzzzt wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want people to accept forced updates, just send the security fixes. Don't change the UI and don't mess with the users preferences, especially concerning privacy.

Honestly, I've never heard anyone complain apart from tech people. Long reboots are annoying but overall, Windows 10 is pretty well accepted by every non-technical person I know.

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 still really bad.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#297

Post by Dork1234 »

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…

When Vista came out I bought a new machine with AMD A6 4600+ and 2GB of RAM with Vista 64bit and it ran great. I had no driver issues or performance issue even with default install. You didn't need 4GB of RAM, you just needed new hardware. Limited RAM and drivers for the older hardware were the biggest problems, Microsoft drastically changed the driver DDK and many hardware venders had poor quality or no drivers which led to many of the problems people had. Kinda sad I got rid of this machine, it would be interesting to benchmark it to a Raspberry PI 4 in Linux.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#298

Post by AnIdiotOnTheNet »

reflectiv wrote: post #291
AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Da, it is for your own good comrade! I really wish people who insist on claiming some right to control how users use their own computers would leave IT forever.

And if it were left open ended at the request of people like you...we'd still have compromised systems out there spread amongst normal people as well as within infrastructure and other more critical pieces of hardware. People cannot be trusted to upgrade. It REALLY IS good to force people to upgrade.

> 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 totally willing to sacrifice hours of peoples lives, ruin their projects, and break their systems in the name of "I know better". It doesn't matter what they're doing, or how important it is to their lives, what matters is what you think is important.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#299

Post by Shared404 »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #254
matthewmacleod wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nostalgia is, it seems, a hell of a drug.

I still have an XP laptop at work because it happens to have a serial port. Every time I use it I'm briefly shocked at how responsive everything is. That's on period hardware. God the future sucks. IT has been destroyed by complexity fetishists and resume driven development.

Not entirely. There's still Alpine, Gentoo, Void, Debian/Devuan -- All of which still run on reasonably low specced hardware, and can be loaded with XFCE/Tiling WM's for a lightweight UX.

Outside of Linux and other FL/OSS OS's I have to agree though.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#300

Post by speeder »

dotancohen wrote: post #92
fimdomeio wrote: post #43

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.

> did not expect proprietary operating > systems to be actively working against you. What did I miss? I've last used Windows in 2005, I'm pretty sure that was XP Service Pack 2. What does it do now to actively work against you?

Aside from other stuff others already mentioned, I would also want to add:

Windows Vista and onwards, MS, while claiming it was for technical and stability reasons, nixed a lot of features that were annoying to movie studios, basically they changed how driver stack worked in a way to make DRM easier and make harder to pirate movies.

But as consequence of that, a lot of cool stuff outright stopped working:

* Some interesting video modes

* Some obscure ways to output data

* And the one that annoyed me the most: Soundcards became useless.

Before that, Soundcards could do a LOT, they could have their own processor and do a lot of fancy stuff, most famously they could do "3D Audio", and it was super cool, Thief for example is a game that uses it well, it would use its own processor to do same thing GPUs do for graphics, and do it for audio, it would even raytrace sound (ie: suppose a character is on the other side of the wall, but there is a door on that wall, the card would calculate the sound of that character footsteps reflecting on the walls and reach you, then if you were using headphone or 4+ speakers it would make you hear the sound coming from the reflections, thus a person with good hearing could deduce where an enemy was, on the other side of a wall).

That stunt basically killed off the soundcard market, people then were making cooler and cooler cards, after that the cards became little more than just output ports soldered on a tiny board.

Sound Cards pre-vista: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/9/95/Cr...

Sound Cards post-vista: https://http2.mlstatic.com/D_NQ_NP_768672-MLB41729093507_052...

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