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

361–370 of 485 posts

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#361

Post by cartoonfoxes »

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.

This is such a stupid, frustrating argument to hear.

Pro and Enterprise shouldn't be the same in this regard as Home but often are.

Four days ago I had to entertain a courier waiting to pick up a 6-figures piece of equipment for a waiting air-freight cargo plane, for immediate transport to a remote mining site, all because the fucking piece of shit fucking Win 10 Enterprise on a very expensive rugged laptop decided to hang itself in an update loop for an hour.

We dealt with different garbage during the Windows 7 and previous eras, yes, but I'm not sure we're better off on the whole. Windows 10 has given a whole new meaning to the "Blue Screen of Death".

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#362

Post by cartoonfoxes »

AnIdiotOnTheNet wrote: post #298
reflectiv wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tot…

> 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.

A thousand times this.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#364

Post by spurgu »

fsflover wrote: post #330
noisy_boy wrote: post #40

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 :)

One could also try ReactOS for such cases.

The ReactOS team might gain some insights from this leak...

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#365

Post by virtue3 »

JohnBooty wrote: post #284
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!"

I say this as somebody who really enjoyed W2K, but the complaints about WinXP's default theme are very difficult to understand when: - The classic theme was just a few clicks away - Of all the problems with XP, I would not even list the "easily changed default theme" in the top.... 100 or so. I would not expect to see such sentiment on HN, of all places.

Hey man, let people complain about what color the bike shed was painted.

XP was a pretty damn good OS that came out of a time when there wasn't a lot of options.

It was pretty stable. You could change network settings without restarting. It was built on the NT core instead of whatever 95/98/ME hot mess was.

The main issue was it's exposure to viruses. Which was address in 8+ (windows actually started acting more like linux with regards to user/admin).

Windows7 IMHO had the best ui out of the box. 10 grew on me. Let's just not talk about 8.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#366

Post by tgv »

beagle3 wrote: post #269
tgv wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There have always been rumors about such back doors, but even the public ones, encryption schemes, have never been proven by pure analysis. As far as back doors in code goes, have a look at this: http://underhanded-c.org/ . It's a pity it seems to have been short lived.

“Never been proved” is correct, but this proof is quite a tall order. Remember, almost everything in the Snowden disclosures was known before snowden - but generally dismissed as “conspiracy theories”. None if it was proved, until it was.

Then it needs some authoritative source, a leak, or result of a raid. Which was my point: analyzing the Windows XP code most likely is not going to prove there's a US mandated backdoor.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#367

Post by ripdog »

Hackbraten wrote: post #351
ripdog wrote: post #294

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

While you’re not wrong, I think no one should have to explain themselves for wanting to stay compliant with the law.

Even when the law has no basis in reality? Windows XP is going to stay in copyright for... how many decades now? Even though it has no commercial value anymore?

Laws which make no sense and have no value to society should be ignored. If software is abandoned, it should be distributed freely.

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#368

Post by jasomill »

GeekyBear wrote: post #306
bayindirh wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That was actually Windows 2000, based on the NT 4 code base. It was near perfect, given the era it was made in. I also remember Windows 2000 fondly. It was really really stable. Even if it looked like it's frozen like a polar ice cap (they weren't melting that bad back then), a short coffee break would give it enough time to normalize itself and continue like nothing happened. Should retry it in a VM sometime. :)

>It was really really stable. Windows 2000 was the last version of the NT branch where Dave Cutler was in charge. He's a legend for a reason. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J2GV_bCfnCw Computer History Museum long form interviews: Part 1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=29RkHH-psrY Part 2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVgSLud50ss

Official PDF transcript:

https://www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/10271716...

Re: Windows XP source code has leaked

#370

Post by wheresmycraisin »

Kliment wrote: post #74
etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's the demographic that's using XP in China? I find this super interesting...

Industrial equipment control computers mostly - the computer is part of the machine and cannot be upgraded. You see this quite a lot outside China too.

No, there are tons of regular office computers and even home computers that run XP. Industrial computers in China would actually be running fairly up to date OS's compared to, say, US.
Post reply on HN