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Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

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Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#351
post #151
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OTVDM will allow running 16-bit windows programs on modern 64-bit windows.

OTVDM is great, but it's just using Wine. Windows really ripped out the whole 16-bit compatibility layer, which is a little sad.

It’s not that Microsoft chose to rip it out. NTVDM relied on Virtual 8086 mode. X86 processors cannot transition to this mode from 64-bit mode.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virtual_8086_mode

Intel is proposing to remove 16-but support entirely:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/developer/articles/t...

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#352

It's not insane, it's my expectation for a tool. My hammer still works perfectly well with nails I bought 30 years ago. It's impossible to build on shifting foundations that are constantly breaking backward compatibility. You eventually spend all your time maintaining instead of creating. Then you have to go reinvent your wheel, and in my experience as a user your shiny new one isn't necessarily better. Most of the s…

On the other hand, you’re stuck with stupid limitations in perpetuity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14286383

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#353

I used to believe this, but no longer. Any Steam game that used the "Games for Windows – Live" service, and wasn't updated since the service shut down in 2014, would fail to launch on Windows 10 & later, because the DLLs for the service were removed. For a time, folks were able to download the DLL from third-party sites, but that doesn't work now.

Older games without DRM or other networked services also may not work due to graphics incompatibility. (cnc-ddraw salvages a lot of them though: https://github.com/FunkyFr3sh/cnc-ddraw)

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#354
post #330

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the negativity stems from the all the illegal, immoral, and damaging acts in this era. Not least of which is pouring millions into a baseless pump and dump scheme laying hallucinated charges of infringement against the entire Linux ecosystem but there are plenty of other issues. In short people hated them for being shitty people who do shitty things and present leadership were important folks when these shitt…

> Perhaps the negativity stems from the all the illegal, immoral, and damaging acts in this era. Perhaps, but hate against Microsoft was not the point of the discussion. You are free to see them in whichever light you want, I just don't understand why you have to down-vote me or bring that into completely different discussion. The question here was about the technical issues and their work on making software tick des…

I didn't down vote you because down vote to disagree doesn't lead to optimum discussions a thought process I note with amusement that you don't share this idea.

> You are transferring a behavior you have projected on a company over the entire group of people

I specifically indicted the top leadership who were as now in a position of authority when immoral actions were taken and continued to work for the same org. This is a pretty clear and defensible position whereas you said.

> That has nothing to do with hate against Microsoft. To me that sounds like a whataboutism.

and also

> I remember the hostility in those years 95-2005 towards Microsoft. There is still some cult in some Internet communities where trashing anything developed by Microsoft is seen as some kind of expertise or something by usually self-proclaimed experts.

You compared people with a legitimate ax to grid to cultists and denigrated them to "self proclaimed experts" You are again the party committing the sin you project.

> There are people who passionately hate GNU, Linux,

These things aren't of neutral value. There are people who hate purple and Hitler but nobody thinks these things are the same.

> For the second there are law and law enforcement officials to decide if they did illegal business or not.

They actually were repeatedly found to have engaged in illegal behavior in a court of law and furthermore beyond multiple losses in a court of law ample information is available. Nobody with a brain thinks OJ was innocent or feels bound to disregard for instance the book where he describes the crime called "If I did it".

> Also, history is against you, Microsoft was, and still is very profitable company.

How is history against me? IBM literally helped the Nazis categorize their population so they could exterminate millions of people and the people who helped make those decisions didn't cease to exist in 1945 on indeed in 1955 and they were and are worth of critique even if it would be nonsensical now to impose that judgement on people who born decades after the war. We can both remember AND be reasonable.

History by definition is the things that happened. The fact that it tends to forgot the bad things done by people who later did well for themselves isn't "history" its a collective dementia a mental defect which keeps us making the same mistakes. An actual appreciation for history would suggest a commitment to objective memory not white washing.

> I have been 100% Linux user since many years and have contributed to a GNU project

This is the software equivalent of conspicuously announcing that you have a black friend. You needn't as nobody is suggesting you have insufficient credibility. What's happened is you wrote some fairly inflammatory next to something mundane that is reasonably considered and most people have ignored the mundane thing because you set your apple pie adjacent to a flaming bag of poo and when everyone mentioned the shit you have followed with a bunch of bad explanations for the poo and ill considered arguments so we are still talking about the smell of shit instead of eating pie together.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#355
post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the bright side, the end result is that on Mac there are only apps that have been updated this decade.

Is the lack of an app a good thing?

It can be because it’s an incentive to create a new, up-to-date app.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#356

That shouldn't be considered remotely impressive. It should be seen as routine and expected, and if it doesn't work, that should be considered a hugely humiliating and unacceptable fail. To be clear, I am not saying that it's not impressive in the shitshow that is 2023. I am saying what norms we should work towards.

Agreed. There is absolutely no reason most statically compiled binaries should stop working.

There are many reasons. Notably, binaries don't tend to compile the OS into themselves. There's always some kind of interface boundary where something depends on OS-defined behavior, like windows and menu bars and printing and finding the user's personal folder and so on and so forth. Microsoft decided to do all of the work to preserve old interfaces long after making newer ones, but it does come at a heavy maintenance and management cost which only makes sense in a market with extremely lucrative legacy forces.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#357
post #241
post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sadly a consequence of how NTFS plugin architecture works. Using Windows 11 the answer is ReFS.

Do you still have to pay for a Workstation license to get that on your local machine?

It is coming to regular Windows 11 as well.

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/dev-drive/

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is that any different from any other program on any system failing because of a daemon not running? Inter-process communication exists on every operating system. IPC means your program's behaviour can be different depending on what other processes are running. This is not specific to Linux. Your other point is equally as inane. Anything might fail because it requires some external program, or external data files,…

Compiling stuff yourself is generally much harder than one might want it to be be. The instructions might or might not actually work unless you're on a source based distro. It also might take hours. Or days, but the stuff that's big enough to take days generally works out of the box. Windows has IPC, but doesn't have as heavy of an influence from the Unix philosophy, and Android seems to have even less. More stuff is…

Any software that has build instructions that don't work is probably written by morons. I wouldn't want to run it. I certainly have no interest in running software that takes days to compile. Overengineered crap.

Re: Windows 11 will happily execute a binary compiled 30 years ago

#360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drivers being kernel specific is really annoying

Major problem with android, stuck with whatever version of android due to binary blob drivers.

The major problem is Google not enforcing updates via their contracts.

Project Treble has made Android a pseudo microkernel with stable ABI for drivers.

However Google has decided it is still up to OEMs to decide if driver are to be shipped or not.

With no legal enforcement for accessing Google services, OEMs rather sell updated hardware.

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