Posts by Richard Plinston

> and getting less every release

ReactOS and WINE co-operate in development.

Re: Shades of SCO saga

> which is why Android require a patent license from Microsoft.

There have been specific items that are implemented by phones that may require a licence for a patent. One example is SD cards using VFAT where MS held a patent on some filenaming mechanism. If the phone does not have an SD slot or does not use VFAT then no licence is required. This is regardless of whether it uses Android or any other OS.

This why some phones do not have an SD slot, they avoid the MS licence fees.

Re: There was no way

> Selling Windows Phone to Nokia was designed to kill Nokia,

That makes no sense. MS _paid_ Nokia to take WP, they paid a $billion a year (for 5 years). This was to kill Symbian, Maemo/Meego, Meltemi, and other projects and to associate the Nokia brand, the top phone company, with WP.

After the five years with Nokia phone division make a loss every quarter in spite of MS's payment, they decided to drop WP and go Android with Nokia-X. As they were now ~95% of WP, Microsoft had to buy the division to keep WP going.

Killing Nokia wasn't 'by design' it was by incompetence.

Re: "They were always 6 months behind the competition "

> Nokia really believed that there was a market for a "Linux phone" - the market was probably, at its best, 10% of the desktop one.

Google believed there was a market for a "Linux phone" too. So far more than 3 billion of them have sold.

Nokia N9 outsold Lumia where it was allowed to be sold. Nokia-X also sold well for the short time it was manufactured.

Re: Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.

> Would dear old Billy have give the OS free to drive mass adoption ? Unthinkable in M$ stable.

They did that. It didn't work.

MS gave Nokia a $billion a year for 5 years. This was to offset the licence fees for Windows Phone and made it free to Nokia. I don't know if it was 'up to' or just paid out in full, but I doubt that Nokia ever used a $billion of licences in any year.

In spite of this Nokia phone division did not make a profit in any quarter that they sold Windows Phone. Most phones were sold below cost but even then never got mass adoption.

> They killed Nokia, by design.

No. It was incompetence. They were always 6 months behind the competition because it was only MS that could add features into the system or build it for newer hardware. While iPhone and Android jumped ahead with every new development, WP was always 'last year's technology.

MS did kill every other thing that Nokia wanted to do. N8 and Nokia-X did escape but when these looked like they would outsell WP they were killed off.

Re: The horrors and blessings of the console

> God knows how, it didn't have an MMU

I have the Bell System Technical Journal July-August 1977 here, the Unix issue (and a collectors item). One article is 'UNIX on a Microprocessor'' which describes implementing Unix (edition 6 I think) on a DEC LSI-11 microcomputer with 20K words (16bit words) and no MMU. Granted that was single-user.

An 8086 can support 1 megabyte and is perfectly capable of running multiuser systems. I have some here: ICL PC2s - 8086 with 1Mb running Concurrent-CP/M-86 (though not switched on for a couple of decades).

> even linux requires a minimum of a 386

Yes and that was deliberate because Linux said: """It uses every conceivable feature of the 386 I could find, as it was also a project to teach me about the 386."""

However, ELKS* is a fork of Linux for lesser CPUs such as the 8086.

> And ran on a PDP-11, not x86.

Unix ran on a large number of different processors. BSD (Berkeley System Distribution) was a distribution of Unix, based on actual Unix source code, with some changes and additions. In fact 1BSD was just the additions.

> No idea how you worked that one out.

No, you don't, do you.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embeddable_Linux_Kernel_Subset

Re: The horrors and blessings of the console

> Microsoft never actually coded anything[0] for Xenix,

That is not quite true. Xenix included additional code that was owned by MS, though they may have paid SCO to actually write it. For example there was record locking which was not in Unix and this continued to exist in Open Server.

> it was SCO who ported it to the IBM PC's 8086/8088 architecture in roughly 1983.

Yes, SCO, a father and son team, did the work but they were paid by Microsoft under contract and did it on Microsoft's development machines (DEC VAX) in-house. It was actually released in 1980, before the IBM PC and before MS bought a licence to use QDOS/SCP-DOS to make PC-DOS and MS-DOS.

Later SCO did buy the rights to Xenix and developed it further but still had to pay licence fees to MS for code that MS owned (but may have been written originally by SCO).

> Yes, the very same machine that shipped with MS-DOS.

Actually it was used on machines quite unlike the 5150 IBM-PC. Altos 8086 boxes ran an 8086 and had a full megabyte of RAM and ran multiuser with serial terminals. Until 1983 MS-DOS 2 (and the PC-XT) it couldn't support hard disks while Xenix required a hard disk. So, no, they weren't the same machines.

Re: The horrors and blessings of the console

> MS could have used Xenix as the basis for a proper PC unix OS

It was "a proper PC unix OS", it was AT&T UNIX edition 7 ported to the 8086 by SCO. Later when SCO bought the rights (partly funded by Paul) it was updated to later x86 and to System III and System V and was renamed to Open Server.

> have meant linux and freeBSD never existing

BSD (1977) existed _before_ Xenix (1980) and was free.

If Xenix/OpenServer continued being sold by Microsoft then Linux probably would have taken off sooner.

Re: But...

> to get it to recognise my (common) graphics card so that the window manager server would run.

It's the 21st century now.

Re: Good old days...

> we would load ANSI.SYS in DOS

MS-DOS, up to MS-DOS 5, could run on many different architectures - as long as they were 8086/8088 or similar. Some of these ran serial terminals (SCP and LDP S100 bus machines for example), others had adaptors that were not IBM compatible (DEC Rainbow, Wang PC).

PC-DOS only ran on IBM PC and clones.

Most early software could be configured to use whatever terminal or adaptor was available. Borland's Turbo-Pascal 3, for example, came in four versions: CP/M, CP/M-86, MS-DOS, and PC-DOS. The MS-DOS version could be configured (as could the CP/M versions) to use various terminals including ANSI which was suitable to run on IBM-PC or clones. The PC-DOS version only used bit-banging the mono or color adaptors (or hercules).

Re: If cows had wings..

> A nix* kernel doesn't incorporate a graphical user interface, that part is done on top of the kernel.

And so was the original Windows (and GEM). In fact Windows 1 could be used as a set of libraries that could be linked into a program by the developer so that it could run on MS-DOS without Windows installed. GEM could do the same.

> The choice Gates had was to write Windows on top of a nix* kernel like Xenix,

That would not have been a sensible choice for many reasons, the main one being that 'green screen terminals' couldn't do graphics. While later *nix did do graphics they relied on X11 or similar which was l years later. Xenix was also an expensive option that required royalties to be paid to AT&T, too expensive to reduce it to single user on a machine with built in graphics capability, such as the relatively cheap IBM PC.

Also he wanted to compete against Apple II and Mac, DRI's GEM, and other small machine rather than going upmarket to workstation class machines such as Star or PERQ which had limited market potential. As he didn't build hardware (except Z80 Softcard) he needed to sell lots of copies to make a profit.

> a nix* kernel with the GUI like Gnome or KDE

Actual Unix had these before Linux did with CDE that was built on X11 and Motif. If MS built hardware it may have gone down that route so that it could sell expensive machines and X-terminals and make a profit from the hardware like the CDE developers (IBM, HP, ...) wanted to do.

Xenix on 8086 (or even 80286) wasn't powerful enough to do workstation or multiuser graphics, and was too expensive to do single-user, and was too big to fit on a cheap(ish) IBM-PC. It just wasn't an option that would make a profit for MS.

> I don't want to sound rude or something but I started programming before Gates and Jobs

Be rude for all I care. I started in the 60s and still have machines here in my basement from the mid 70s through to the present day.

Re: If cows had wings..

> While I agree with you I am a bit puzzled about the "Xenix was a multiuser system running serial 'green screen' text only terminals.".

What puzzles you? Are you puzzled about what 'multiuser' is or what 'green screen terminals' are?

I was illustrating why Xenix was not suitable for running Windows (in 1982).

Later, serial graphics terminals did become available, and I have run Windows 3.11 on multiuser systems.

> p.p.s. Satya, selling Nokia was a dumb move.

It was only the phone division that was sold to MS.

It had made a loss every quarter in spite of MS giving it a billion a year (or up to ..)

MS gave them 7 billion for it (wasn't it?).

What was dumb was agreeing to MS's contract to make Windows Phones. The rest followed from that.

Re: If cows had wings..

> The greatest mistake (affecting us) Gates made was not to base Windows on a *nix kernel like Xenix.

Xenix was a multiuser system running serial 'green screen' text only terminals. Initially it ran on 8086 with a limit of one megabyte (note: _not_ gigabyte). There was _no_ graphics at the time. Also it cost several hundred dollars per machine.

When MS started writing Windows it was after DRI's GEM had been demonstrated at COMDEX running on a PC. Other graphics systems also ran on PCs.

Windows was actually written on Xenix machines but never ran there. Developers used Xenix so they could share resources.

> As for Nokia, why did Ballmer and what was his name prevent Nokia from marketing and produce the Linux based phone they had developed.

MS made Nokia cancel products that were not Windows Phone. Why is that difficult to understand? Nokia did manage to release the N8 in some countries but it outsold WP so had to be killed. Same with Nokia-X (Android) when it outsold WP.

> But why not discuss the things Gates did so well.

Vapourware to kill the competition. Contracts that prevented competition. 'Loyalty discounts' that penalised OEMs and killed competing products. Buying competitors and killing their products. Suing over marginal patents.

He did those things brilliantly.

> they can fork Android and role there own version without Gapps.

Actually not, according to the contract they signed to get Gapps. They are either in or out but not both.

Re: Eh?

> Dave Cutler and other exiles from DEC were responsible for the design of NT.

And when DEC noticed that they sued MS and won a settlement alleged to be $100million plus NT running on Alpha and joint marketing.

> IE6 was the most standards-compliant browser in the world

Only by the measurement of 'Microsoft de-facto standards'.

Actually the problem wasn't that it didn't match the standards, but that it had extensions to those standards that website developers used* and, in particular, Frontpage** generated.

* it was alleged that Microsoft paid developers to use IE specific extensions. IE 'hangs around' because of those extensions which are _not_ standard and no other browser bothers with them so either use IE6 or rewrite those in-house websites.

** Frontpage was bought in and amended by MS to generate non-standard websites to lock users into IE.

> They spent a lot of money making the least compatible browser out there

Actually they didn't. Spyglas wrote IE on the basis they would get $5.00 for every copy sold. MS gave it away and thus claimed they never sold any and didn't pay Spyglass. Spyglass sued and eventually won a settlement but had gone bankrupt by then.

Being a 'Microsoft Partner' is the kiss of death.

> I'm not sure what you're getting at with this.

The first edition of 'The Way Ahead' had no mention of the internet at all. This was added in later editions.

> Bill Gates suddenly became very excited about the potential of the internet just before the launch of Windows 95, and so Internet Explorer was included as a last minute thought.

That is not true at all. The first official release of Windows 95 did _not_ include the ability to access the internet but instead had the original MSN, a private network for Win95 users only, which was intended to compete with the internet.

Later there was an extra cost Plus! pack that did include internet access and several OEMs added Netscape and Trumpet Winsock. It was only later releases that Win95 included internet as standard, because they failed to gain traction with MSN.

Internet Exporer was written by Spyglass. MS agreed to pay $5.00 (or so) for every copy _sold_ and then _gave_ it away so nothing was paid to Spyglass until they sued and won.

Re: Damn I Miss Windows Phone

> If MS still wanted to get into phones all they would have to do is port the launcher properly to android

They already did that. Or specifically Nokia had done that with Nokia-X (Android on Nokia phone with WP8 launcher and Microsoft and Nokia services. MS continued selling these as Microsoft-X for a couple of months after they bought Nokia phone division but they outsold Lumia so had to be killed.

Re: Sata

> I know that PoE is a bit of a niche thing, but it's great for reducing annoying cable requirements.

I'm waiting for PoWiFi.

Re: Its the updates

> Imagine a new user gets told he has to run some command line to point at a different repository?

They may need a few weeks training to do a copy and paste ?

Re: Torture I can do without

> Bill Gates owned Apple (does he still own 50%?)

Bill Gates never owned Apple stock, nor was it ever "50%". What happened was "Microsoft also promised to invest approximately $150 million for shares of Apple non-voting preferred stock".

By 2003 all this stock had been sold.

Re: That's what Plinston said

> The hard part of a *nix filesystem is that the OS has to keep track of whether each inode has become orphaned from any filenames while handles were open, and thus delete it "later".

It is not actually 'hard' because it was solved around 'edition 6' and was probably another feature of Multics that was carried over to Unix along with VTOCEs becoming inodes.

Re: That's what Plinston said

> Linux reboots only seem to be mandatory when either the kernel is affected

In my experience with Linux over >20 years I have never met a mandatory reboot. Even with a kernel update you can still continue running the old kernel. I have had Linux servers stay running for more than a 1,000 days. Certainly the services were restarted when they were updated, many of them by the update process itself, all of them transparently.

Re: The future is called Powerpoint

> Since this statement is nonsensical,

If the Operating System is running on the cloud servers which is doing the compute while the state and [the view of] the applications is on the users' thin clients, then the statement may make some sort of sense.

Whether that is the case has yet to be seen.

Re: Windows .. The new mainframe

> the imenent demise of the mainframe.

'Cloud computing' is the rise of the mainframe.

It is likely that this 'new OS' is cloud computing with the user's devices just being thin clients on a monthly contract fee.

> Seamless updates with no interuptions? Won't be Windows based then, ho ho ho!!!!

That is correct. Rebooting to complete an update is a requirement imposed by the file system. Because the directory entry contains both the filename and the pointer to the start of the data blocks it is not possible to replace a file that is open (such as a program file or a library) without corrupting programs that are running or corrupting disk data. Updates to files are written to a different name and a batch script is written to change the names and the directory entries when the system reboots.

*nix does not have this problem because it uses an inode file system that separates the filenames from the file storage and keeps track of which inodes are open to prevent their data blocks being reused even if the file is replaced. When the file is replaced the open files will continue to use the existing inode and data blocks until all opens are closed.

Most of the listed 'features' seem to indicate that this new system will be thin clients using cloud based computing and will monthly fee based. It will likely be like ChromeOS except instead of being web based it will use proprietry protocols so that it continues to be more like a desktop - Terminal Server on steroids.

It seems to me that the hardware will be closed like XBox (and relatively cheap like ChromeBooks) so that it can't be repurposed. It will require a monthly fee for each device (including Android or iPhone phones and tablets) and will work like the phone contract model.

> It's more like an duopoly / oligopoly, as between Google and Apple

There are plenty of non-Google Android phones and app stores. The biggest is Amazon, but there are dozens more.

Re: It is Art

> trump lost over a billion

He may have fraudulently claimed that billion as _his_ loss (to avoid paying taxes) but most of it was banks and other peoples money that was lost by Trump. As they probably also claimed that loss (correctly) then I would like to see Trumps taxes actually audited.

Re: Diplomacy Speech

> By law, treaties are as much US law as any other US law.

Many Americans fail to understand that US laws do not apply in other countries.

Re: Diplomacy Speech

> So any other country making the same goods as China and exporting to the USA will be subject to the same tariffs.

Except there are 'exemptions' which may be applied. When Trump applied tariffs on steel and aluminium there were several countries exempted, including at least one that was obviously a corrupt benefit to Wilbur Ross's shipping company.

https://www.wto.org/english/news_e/news18_e/good_23mar18_e.htm

Re: This treat is not moo-rish

> I do believe that China and many other "developing" economies/governments have gotten a free ride on human rights, pay, benefits, healthcare.

Exactly. And the Republicans are trying to Make America 'Develop' Again by cutting down on "human rights, pay, benefits, healthcare" (except for the 1%) by inflation (deficit), extra taxes (tariffs), cutting out socialism and killing ObamaCare.

Re: For example.

> then sell back into the USA so we get double f**ked in a trade war.

Usually, in any sane tariff regime, imported materials that are re-exported as part of a final product can have the tariff refunded. Of course you will still be screwed by the US tariff on the final product.

> would think it's 1945

'MAGA' hacks back to an earlier age: Trump wants to Make America 1950s Again. That was when America benefited from Europe and the Far East having been destroyed and was before all that 'Civil Rights' nonsense!

Re: 646464

> also int and long could never be the same size.

You seem to be rather limited in your expectations.