Microsoft snaps up GitHub

[Kerbart]

7 hours ago, General Apocalypse said:

Right now they are busy killing Office via the 365 zero security & zero privacy "cloud" and once more there is no viable alternatives for pro users and businesses.

Please elaborate. We have Office 365 at work. To be honest, Office seems to be on its best release cycle since 2000, with a ton of features that are actually useful (fully fledged import & export of non-MS file formats, Excel formulas that make life easier, clipart in Powerpoint that is actually useable in professional presentations, and so on). Not the mention that you can finally work team-style on a single document as in Google Docs (maybe still not as good as Google Docs but it’s a huge leap forward).

While the level of bugs in MS Access remains disappointingly high the suite as a whole is moving in a desired direction.

I really have a hard time seeing how MS is “killing” Office. Maybe as a single-box-with-limited-applications suite. But for an end user it’s certainly improved.

[Lisias]

7 hours ago, General Apocalypse said:

Instead of squeezing 2B less in profits and creating that software from the grounds up Apple style they went and bought the system everyone is talking about.

In the 90's, it was somewhat common the fear of getting into ms' radar and receiving a buy proposal from them.

It usually meant that you were out og business: or you accepted the offer (usually less than your expected revenue), or they would buy a competitor and using them to drive you into bankruptcy. 

Soon, a new business model was created: startups those main ambition was not to thrive, but to be bought by someone. In this model, there's no need of skilled and experienced labour: we need something now, leave the hard problems to be dealt by the buyer.

Repeat this behavior by 2 decades and we have what's we have now.

[Lisias]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Can we now expect Open Windows 1.0 under dual GPL/LGPL license?

https://www.reactos.org

 

And I'm pretty sure this is the reason they are killing the Win32 and 64 API,  and promoting that excrescence they call Metro and UWP.

[kerbiloid]

1 minute ago, Lisias said:

https://www.reactos.org

Are you one of its contributors?

[Lisias]

1 minute ago, kerbiloid said:

Are you one of its contributors?

I wish. :-)

I know these guys since 2005 or 2006, I think. But at that time, I already had been bitten by the Linux bug. :-D

since that time, I only used Windows for fun or for money. If it's not a game, or if no one is paying me explicitly for this, I'm running MacOS or Linux. 

 

 

[kerbiloid]

5 minutes ago, Lisias said:

since that time, I only used Windows for fun or for money. If it's not a game, or if no one is paying me explicitly for this, I'm running MacOS or Linux. 

I'm afraid their endless attempt to create a Windows XP clone is still can't be practically used.
Otherwise we would already use it. But no...

Ubuntu+Wine shows better results.

Edited June 11, 2018 by kerbiloid

[Lisias]

25 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

I'm afraid their endless attempt to create a Windows XP clone is still can't be practically used.
Otherwise we would already use it. But no...

Ubuntu+Wine shows better results.

Their niche are people locked to Windows NT due custom software and/or hardware. 

There're a lot of machinery working for 20 years being controlled by NT4 with custom device drivers. These guys were screwed by MS - they are sitting on multi-million USD machinary running a OS abandoned by MS. Usually the machine's manufacturer are not in business anymore. These guys need a way out.

Edited June 11, 2018 by Lisias
Typo

[LordFerret]

2 hours ago, Lisias said:

https://www.reactos.org

 

Quote

9,000,000+ lines of code
And growing!

Not exactly a thing to brag about. Imagine if MS took this view with its perpetual updates, which is pretty much where it's at.

 

So, aside from the fact this is quite lightweight, why this over Linux?

[kerbiloid]

6 hours ago, LordFerret said:

So, aside from the fact this is quite lightweight, why this over Linux?

Absolutely different APIs and technologies.
Unless you use something cross-platform like Java (with its own major disadvantages), almost for everything except most trivial things, you have to use different libraries and paradygms.

Say, almost greatest Windows' killer feature is ActiveX (aka OLE automation, aka COM). Almost every complex Windows program uses it.
With it you can easily use parts of one program inside another one just by calling them.
Say, typically you access to SQL server with one set of ActiveX objects, process data using some ActiveX libraries, output results as MS Office or Open/Libre Office documents with corresponding ActiveX objects, too.

But ActiveX doesn't present in Linux, so you have to bother with absolutely different mechanisms at all, like Java bridges and so on (and if you ever have been implementing OpenOffice support in your program and studying these two things, it's highly unlikely you would prefer the latter way).

Absolutely different multidemdia libraries, or very restricted abilities of the common ones.

Instead of former dll-hell in Windows (which is no more a problem, once internet allows to download huge volumes, and you don't need to share one dll for a system), you get a package dependency hell in Linux..
And a headache with your program distribution for different Linuxes or even Linux version (Windows has much longer long-time support period de facto, it (too) rarely changes API things which already present).

Also, Windows is a system from 90s, while Linux is a 90s remake of a 1970 system.
Things which were important on mainframes of 1970s with very limited memory size and calculation-oriented users, still define the "Linux way", while Windows was from scratch oriented on mass users.

So, a freeware operating system able to just run the existing Windows programs would be great.
(And would be soon killed by Microsoft lawyers, so we can presume how much seriously MS takes ReactOS and Wine attempts to do this).

Edited June 12, 2018 by kerbiloid

[General Apocalypse]

 @Kerbart The problem with 365 is it's aggressive push against traditional office coupled with it's complete lack of any security or privacy. No one working with sensitive data wants it due to it's inherent vulnerability but Microsoft is willing to take away your offline version and put you in their walled garden online. Not to mention THEY decide what to do with all your data .

In the last 5+ years we had 5 major vulnerabilities for offline computers and dozens of major vulnerabilities for online systems. Transmission encryption is a joke with cyphers being severely outdated badly implemented , storage encryption is also getting there . Since they gave their rump to Uncle Sam via PRISM and other programs  Microsoft dosen't have to disclose breaches as they happen since they know they won't be hit to hard with the law hammer.

We depend on Office for productivity whether we like it or not , Microsoft knows that and it's been handling it in the worst possible way. I still have some hopes for Office 2019 since the 2016 release was just a change of colors and some bugfixes.

[Lisias]

39 minutes ago, General Apocalypse said:

Since they gave their rump to Uncle Sam via PRISM and other programs  Microsoft dosen't have to disclose breaches as they happen since they know they won't be hit to hard with the law hammer.

Going bluntly to the point, it's the huge breach for abuse. NSA not only allegedly has a backdoor, but also rules with iron fist the size if the cryptographic keys allowed to be used by USA citizens. Reason? To be able to decrypt their data if they choose so.

Problem is: do you really thrust every single NSA agent, as well their procedures, in order to put every sensitive data of yours by be scrutinized by NSA if they choose so?

[Lisias]

8 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Also, Windows is a system from 90s, while Linux is a 90s remake of a 1970 system.
Things which were important on mainframes of 1970s with very limited memory size and calculation-oriented users, still define the "Linux way", while Windows was from scratch oriented on mass users.

Not exactly. The Win32API have its roots on Win16 API, from the middle 80's. The first Win32 implementation was called Win32S, and it was a DLL for Windows 3.1. What later became DirectX 1.0 also was born on Win16, under the name WinG.

The Windows95' Win32 API was, in true, the first native implementation for the Win32S. At least to the end of the 32 bits era, each Win32 Application in reality were executed into his own "Win16" sandbox - this was how Microsoft managed to salvage all the Collaborative Multitask Paradigm applications into a Preemptive Multitask one. Under the hoods, the Win32 is somewhat similar to POSIX - including the stream I/O (stdout, stdin and stderr). The MFC did a lot to wrap this all on a (allegedly) nice Object Oriented Interface.

If you want a real new API implementation from the 90s, go for IBM's OS/2.

I can't say much for Win64. I already had ditched Windows by that time.

Edited June 12, 2018 by Lisias
less than ideal grammar...

[kerbiloid]

21 minutes ago, Lisias said:

Not exactly. The Win32API have its roots on Win16 API, from the middle 80's. The first Win32 implementation was called Win32S, and it was a DLL for Windows 3.1. What later became DirectX 1.0 also was born on Win16, under the name WinG.

Yes, I remember that.
But Win16 was just an extension for DOS. The first self-sufficient Windows operating system was Windows 95, which was 32bit, and that's mid-1990s.
Also though birth year of Unix is  1970, it was being developed 2-3 years before,  and was based on an earlier project of the authors.
So, Windows is from 1980-1990s, while Linux is a remake of 1960-1970s.

Also, Win32 was a very great thing after 16 bit with their "near" and "long" pointers, tiny/huge arrays, so on.
And the horrible MFC is a living walking dead  alas not reminder. So long-lasting long-time support, that it is almost a necromancy.

Edited June 12, 2018 by kerbiloid

[linuxgurugamer]

Windows 95 was actually running on top of DOS.  It was fairly easy to boot to DOS rather than Win95.

I thing that Win98 may have been standalone.

And, you are forgetting about Windows NT and Windows 2000, both from the same era

[Lisias]

44 minutes ago, linuxgurugamer said:

Windows 95 was actually running on top of DOS.  It was fairly easy to boot to DOS rather than Win95.

I thing that Win98 may have been standalone.

And, you are forgetting about Windows NT and Windows 2000, both from the same era

No. The DOS was a "bootstrap" for Win95 Kernel, more or less as UEFI is nowadays. Once Win95 takes over, it assumes everything, from disk access to memory management, and the DOS-BOX was a X86 VM being controlled by the Win95's "supervisor". The "286 protected mode" died with Windows 3.0 (even the 3.1 didn't supported it anymore).

All the Win9x series did this way. The Windows NT 3.1, the first of the New Technology series, were the first to completely get rid of MS-DOS.

Trivia: Microsoft "bought" some DEC Engineers for the specific task of building NT (ditching IBM's partnership for building OS/2 in the process). The NT series had born supporting not only X86, but SPARC and MIPS. Interesting enough, the Win32 API was just an "application" running over the NT's Kernel. They also had an OS/2 and a POSIX "applications" - so you could run OS/2 and UNIX programs under NT, in parallel with the Win32 ones (how they would communicate between them is another history - I don't know if they ever implemented such a thing, but it was possible).

The NT 2000 was the old NT stripped off the OS/2 and POSIX "applications", providing only Win32 support. Windows XP was the NT series being rebadged for personal use (and heavily reworked in the internals, to allow faster HW access from the user-land, mainly due the new 2D and 3D Accelerator cards - what we call GPU nowadays).

Edited June 12, 2018 by Lisias
yeah. typos.

[Lisias]

2 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Also though birth year of Unix is  1970, it was being developed 2-3 years before,  and was based on an earlier project of the authors.

The previous work of the authors was they commitment for the MULTICS project. They found the MULTICS too much ambitious for the era, and choose to simplify things.

Interesting enough, what we call UNIX nowadays is, essentially, what MULTICS aimed to implement in the 60s. Every single feature (at least, the ones I can remember) is implemented in a way or another.

As a side note, I would not demote UNIX (and Linux) due the age of the API. The POSIX standard evolved with time, the UNIX we have nowadays is way distant from what it was at the time - and the fact that is still possible to compile most of the programs of that era is due the careful work of not ditching old APIs when adding new ones.

Everything we have nowadays has his roots on MULTICS, after all. The same way every single car we use nowadays has its roots on the old Ford Model T. 

[linuxgurugamer]

17 minutes ago, Lisias said:

No. The DOS was a "bootstrap" for Win95 Kernel, more or less as UEFI is nowadays. Once Win95 takes over, it assumes everything, from disk access to memory management, and the DOS-BOX was a X86 VM being controlled by the Win95's "supervisor". The "286 protected mode" died with Windows 3.0 (even the 3.1 didn't supported it anymore).

All the Win9x series did this way. The Windows NT 3.1, the first of the New Technology series, were the first to completely get rid of MS-DOS.

Trivia: Microsoft "bought" some DEC Engineers for the specific task of building NT (ditching IBM's partnership for building OS/2 in the process). The NT series had born supporting not only X86, but SPARC and MIPS. Interesting enough, the Win32 API was just an "application" running over the NT's Kernel. They also had an OS/2 and a POSIX "applications" - so you could run OS/2 and UNIX programs under NT, in parallel with the Win32 ones (how they would communicate between them is another history - I don't know if they ever implemented such a thing, but it was possible).

The NT 2000 was the old NT stripped off the OS/2 and POSIX "applications", providing only Win32 support. Windows XP was the NT series being rebadged for personal use (and heavily reworked in the internals, to allow faster HW access from the user-land, mainly due the new 2D and 3D Accelerator cards - what we call GPU nowadays).

I beg to differ.  It was fairly easy to exit out of the Win-95 overlay.  Memory management was a laugh back then, it's better now.

I'm not referring to the Dos-box, I'm saying that the underlying os was DOS for Win-95.  Win-95 was layered on top of DOS in a slightly better way than Win 3.1 was.  and Win-95 kept many of the old Win 3.1 ini files, etc

[LordFerret]

7 hours ago, Lisias said:

The DOS was a "bootstrap" for Win95 Kernel, ...

 

7 hours ago, linuxgurugamer said:

I beg to differ.  It was fairly easy to exit out of the Win-95 overlay.  Memory management was a laugh back then, it's better now.

I'm not referring to the Dos-box, I'm saying that the underlying os was DOS for Win-95.  Win-95 was layered on top of DOS in a slightly better way than Win 3.1 was.  and Win-95 kept many of the old Win 3.1 ini files, etc

I have to concur with linuxgurugamer here. Somewhere in the back of my brain, I recall having to deal with this fact over something I wrote for a client (hooks into DOS)... can't for the life of me remember what the hell it was though (might have been a device driver). Maybe later.

But anyway, yea...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95#Dependence_on_MS-DOS

[Lisias]

10 hours ago, linuxgurugamer said:

I beg to differ.  It was fairly easy to exit out of the Win-95 overlay.  Memory management was a laugh back then, it's better now.

 

2 hours ago, LordFerret said:

I have to concur with linuxgurugamer here. Somewhere in the back of my brain, I recall having to deal with this fact over something I wrote for a client (hooks into DOS).. [...]

But anyway, yea...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_95#Dependence_on_MS-DOS

 

Well.... I can only repeat what the MSDN documentation stated, as I do not had access to the source code! :-)

But from the same link LordFerret posted (emphasis are mine, the phrase is plain wrong):

Quote

As a consequence of being DOS-based, Windows 95 has to keep internal DOS data structures synchronized with those of Windows 95. When starting a program, even a native 32-bit Windows program, MS-DOS momentarily executes to create a data structure known as the Program Segment Prefix. It is even possible for MS-DOS to run out of conventional memory while doing so, preventing the program from launching.^[13]Windows 3.x allocated fixed segments in conventional memory first. Since the segments were allocated as fixed, Windows could not move them, which would prevent any more programs from launching.

Microsoft partially removed support for File Control Blocks (an API hold-over of DOS 1.x and CP/M) in Windows 95 OSR2 (OEM Service Release 2). FCB functions can only read FAT32 volumes, but not write to them.

What happened is that Win95 was supposed to run Win16 programs (otherwise, it would just flop). So, in order to run Win16 programs, Win95 had to keep MS-DOS alive on the first megabyte of RAM. Worst, it had to keep the MS-DOS internal structures synchronised with the canonical ones (in the Win32 kernel).

It was the other way around: Windows 95 didn't need MS-DOS to run, au contraire, it had to keep it updated and synchronized in order to allow Win16 programs to run. The Win32 kernel doesn't relied on MS-DOS for nothing - who needed this beast was the Win16 compatibility layer.

This is completely different from DPMI (whoops... Memory failed me!) VPCI and Dos Extenders (as the Phar Lap's 386/DOS-Extender or the Watcom's PMODE/W or Rational System's DOS4G), that implemented a bridge from the 32 bits world to the 16 bits API used by DOS. These guys needed MS-DOS as they relied on it for everything but 32 bits protected mode.

I think I remember a Win95 feature that allow a Full Screen DOS Session to run programs that would directly access the video framebuffer (and, I think, the soundcard). Again, it's a Win95 feature: the Win32 kernel need to "freeze" some of its subsystems in order to survive the HW direct access. And it was far from perfect, as some non documented video modes (as the VGA Mode-X) confused the Win95 drivers, crashing the thing or, at very least, ending up with a corrupt screen.

This "Win95 is DOS based" hoax is, in a way, Microsoft's fault. At that time, you had to pay serious money to have access to the MSDN, where the hot information was. All the rest had to rely on second hand sources, and some of them were... not exact trustworthy.

The Internet didn't invented the Hoax. We already had this since the 70s and the Age of the BBS.

EDIT: One guy that was effectively DOS based was Quarterdeck's DeskView.  Way better for multitasking than Win95, by the way. They had even their own X Server, DeskView/X .

EDIT2: The Win95 was a DPMI and EMM provider for MS-DOS programs running on the MS-DOS Full Screen Mode and VM boxes. You HAD to use Win95's own extensions, trying to use QEMM386 would halt the system IIRC. Win95 provided services to MS-DOS, and not vice-versa!

If you don't know what's DPMI, the best explanation I know about is here. A lot of drama happened at the times, this text is simply marvelous on telling the story directly from the trenches.

 

Edited June 12, 2018 by Lisias
typo, and a additional information

[LordFerret]

3 hours ago, Lisias said:

I think I remember a Win95 feature that allow a Full Screen DOS Session to run programs that would directly access the video framebuffer (and, I think, the soundcard). Again, it's a Win95 feature: the Win32 kernel need to "freeze" some of its subsystems in order to survive the HW direct access. And it was far from perfect, as some non documented video modes (as the VGA Mode-X) confused the Win95 drivers, crashing the thing or, at very least, ending up with a corrupt screen.

This rings a bell with me kinda... something to do with bypassing an int10h.

 

3 hours ago, Lisias said:

At that time, you had to pay serious money to have access to the MSDN, where the hot information was.

This is 100% true and the source of many an issue, as some individuals who had the info would openly share it while others would share misinformation... just picture the wasted development effort.

 

I remember QuarterDeck's DESQview. If I recall, its idea was spawned from Borland's SideKick, a popular TSR before DESQview came to be. Don't quote me on this however.

[Kerbart]

16 hours ago, kerbiloid said:

Yes, I remember that.
But Win16 was just an extension for DOS. The first self-sufficient Windows operating system was Windows 95, which was 32bit, and that's mid-1990s.
Also though birth year of Unix is  1970, it was being developed 2-3 years before,  and was based on an earlier project of the authors.
So, Windows is from 1980-1990s, while Linux is a remake of 1960-1970s.

Also, Win32 was a very great thing after 16 bit with their "near" and "long" pointers, tiny/huge arrays, so on.
And the horrible MFC is a living walking dead  alas not reminder. So long-lasting long-time support, that it is almost a necromancy.

I would be very careful with those statements as they undermine the perception of how knowledgeable your are in this area.

Windows 95 was really a continuation of Windows 3.11 with a pretty interface and a very tight integration with the MS-DOS version it ran on. Windows NT 3.51 (with its Windows 3.11 looks), and it's follow up version Windows NT 4 (optional 95-style interface available) and Windows 2000 were the true 32 bit systems with an architecture that borrowed more from Unix than from DOS. The reason Windows 98 and the ME abomination existed is because the "professional" NT-line had problems running games, which is problematic for the home-user market Microsoft was in. Windows 2000 was supposed to merge the both of them but couldn't. Had this been seen on time it would have been called NT 5, and the Millenium Edition would have been "2000," but that didn't happen. In the end, Windows XP took on that role with exceptional succes. We now laugh at it, but back then it was instrumental in truly getting rid of MS-DOS for home-market computers instead of merely disguising it like the Windows 95 series did.

Complaining about Microsoft's willingness to support old systems for a long time... if anyone else did it (Apple certainly won't) it'd be admired as commitment towards existing customers. When Microsoft does it, it's "necromancy."

1 hour ago, LordFerret said:

I remember QuarterDeck's DESQview. If I recall, its idea was spawned from Borland's SideKick, a popular TSR before DESQview came to be. Don't quote me on this however.

Ah, good times. I never used SideKick but I was a happy DESQview user. And Norton Commander. From a time when Norton was synonym to "high quality tools."

5 hours ago, Lisias said:

This "Win95 is DOS based" hoax is, in a way, Microsoft's fault. At that time, you had to pay serious money to have access to the MSDN, where the hot information was. All the rest had to rely on second hand sources, and some of them were... not exact trustworthy.

I actually relied on what Microsoft people told me.

Especially Bill Gates who said that XP was the first (from a 95/98/ME perspective) that no longer contained MS DOS code.

Edited June 13, 2018 by Kerbart

[Kerbart]

22 hours ago, General Apocalypse said:

We depend on Office for productivity whether we like it or not , Microsoft knows that and it's been handling it in the worst possible way. I still have some hopes for Office 2019 since the 2016 release was just a change of colors and some bugfixes.

But what colors and bugfixes! They've been a tremendous boost in productivity. Multiple datasources for pivot tables (and a completely new way the data is pulled from external sources), overhauled graphing engine, greatly improved multi-user support (including messaging to other users in the same document), professional clip-art (something I've never seen in Office before), a whole slew of new functions in Excel that people actually use, and OneDrive integration that allows me to share documents with other users in ways that are far more efficient and secure than I'd do in the past.

What's more amazing that those are all actually not features, but apparently just new colors and bugfixes.

[kerbiloid]

29 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

I would be very careful with those statements as they undermine the perception of how knowledgeable your are in this area.

Not that I care much about perception of my knowleadgeability, and definitely am not a purist to compare true and cosplayed Win32.

Windows95 used DOS just as a launcher and in some cases as a system tool.

It was the first Windows officially declared as an operating system (and this was taken sceptically, as well as 3d shooters for Windows in the world of DOS4GW).
Until Win95  Windows was just one of popular DOS extenders (and there was a plenty of them).

Since Win95 non-DOS part of the system was many times bigger than its DOS ancestry.
DOS in Windows95 is just an obsolete body part in process of its digesting and replacing. 
The presence of autoexec.bat and config.sys in Windows XP doesn't mean it's still DOS.
_{(Yes, I know that XP is NT)}

All Win9x were a continuation of DOS, that's their disadvantage comparing to NT line, but this doesn't mean they are not operating systems.
(Millenium was one big disadvantage itself, whatever it was).

29 minutes ago, Kerbart said:

Complaining about Microsoft's willingness to support old systems for a long time... if anyone else did it

If anyone did it not forcing in 2010s to use 1980s-style pig latin types thought out by Microsoft in 16bit epoch with its near/long voodoo, when C++ was even still having no official standards.
A horrible mix of classes and macroassembler definitions in every function, and other nice stuff to be forgotten as a nasty nightmare.

(Probably) it was nice 30 years when they have no other option, but should be killed with fire many years ago, while it was just a framework larva.

Edited June 13, 2018 by kerbiloid

[Lisias]

6 hours ago, Kerbart said:

I actually relied on what Microsoft people told me.

Me too. Mainly because I paid serious money to some of that Master Classes, and the DCOM one I had aceess to some insider information (".net 1.0 is really the old VisualBasic pretending to be a Operating System"). :)

Microsoft was already huge at that time with all the clutter and kludge a corporation had - but worse. Someone wrote a good book at the time, "Micro-serfs".

One thing that worth to mention is that the main Windows technologies (DDE, COM, DCOM) came from the Excel Team (true fact). And the Excel and Windows Kernel teams had some grudges - one would happily ditch the other if they could (my conclusion on what I was told). So you need to take the source of the information in consideration to unbias it.

 

6 hours ago, Kerbart said:

Especially Bill Gates who said that XP was the first (from a 95/98/ME perspective) that no longer contained MS DOS code.

What's different from saying that 9x relied on MS-DOS. See my post about.

Besides, what a P/R guy says to the public rarely is so technically accurate as a engineer says on a Master Class to another engineers ;-)

Edited June 13, 2018 by Lisias

[Lisias]

11 hours ago, Kerbart said:

Windows 95 was really a continuation of Windows 3.11 with a pretty interface and a very tight integration with the MS-DOS version it ran on.

Worst. It was a "wrapper" over it.

Each Win32 application run on it's own "win16 instance" boxed into a runtime library, running on a dedicated process.

So,  a Win95 application could still freeze its container by failing to call the process events call, exactly as in the Win16 era. But since this application lived in its own "win16 sandbox", only its windows get frozen, other processes could still run.

post-edit: As long it manages not to break something inside the Win9x kernel - what was pretty easy at that time!  

Edited June 13, 2018 by Lisias
missing quotes