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Wrong. Cutler's source code was originally for the 64-bit Alpha (which was proposed at the time, and took over when the Prism hardware project got dumped hard). The Prism hardware didn't work: the Alpha beta hardware did, and a lot of development was occurring on it, which is partly why Prism got dropped. Cutler took his code with him, illegally, when Microsoft hired him away from DEC, and his kernel became the core of NT. So switching NT back to being 64-bit is easier than it sounds.

Do a web search: the settlement between DEC and Microsoft for this theft was significant, even for Microsoft, and part of the settlement was that NT would always run on Alphas (which was easy, since Cutler's work was originally written for Alphas). You might start with this article:

http://www.windowsitpro.com/Windows/Article/Articl eID/4494/4494.html

Windows was already 64 bit when the DEC Alpha came out. Which was somewhere between 1992-95 IIRC.

Except that the DEC Alpha port of Windows NT was 32-bit only. IIRC, Microsoft never officially released a 64-bit version of Windows that ran on Alpha, and it was DEC/Compaq who did most of the development on it before it was cancelled.

--Troy

Apparently, the number of servers that run messenger went from 250 32-bit servers to 25 64-bit servers. Apparently it was due to a limit in the number of network connections in the 32-bit edition

What are the "network limits" of linux, BSD, etc BTW?

I was much more interested to read this :-

This one's bizarre, but we heard at lunch today that Apple is unhappy with the PowerPC production at IBM and will be switching to Intel-compatible chips this very year. Yeah, seriously.

... in Thurrot's blog from this Tuesday.

Huh?!? see this - scroll down to "5.45pm"

If one of my "most unabashedly positive supporters" said my OS had "the makings of a train wreck" I'd go postal on people like that too. They and their zealous IP lawyers probably consider the GUI features part of the distribution and thus (like Longhorn) copyrighted material that should not have been so publicly released in the first place.

Longhorn screenshot takers across the Internet, I think, should be cautious. I do wonder what it means for other Windows screenshots: does Microsoft have rights to the widgets and the like, and should users prepare to be sued for taking their pictures? Just wondering...

"Apparently, there is a condition in the EULA preventing people from posting screenshots. Nobody saw anything like that."

http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Index.cfm?Art icleID=46188

"Apple is unhappy with the PowerPC production at IBM and will be switching to Intel-compatible chips this very year. ...seriously"

This blog entry from Paul Thurrott (from WinInfo) says:
"This one's bizarre, but we heard at lunch today that Apple is unhappy with the PowerPC production at IBM and will be switching to Intel-compatible chips this very year. Yeah, seriously."

I just thought I'd mention it to see what everyones reponses are - I didn't see anyone pick up on it in the earlier /. post about Microsofts Longhorn Beta...

The historians aren't telling me anything I don't already know and aren't disagreeing with anything I've said.

In fact, they're saying exactly what I already have - that OS/2 1.x was in maintenance while IBM developed (what became) OS/2 2.x and that Microsoft were working on *a completely different product* that was going to be "OS/2 NT" and instead became "Windows NT". NT's initial support for HPFS is there - like its support for OS/2 1.x text-mode applications *because it was originally going to replace OS/2* and *NOT* because it is in any way derived from the codebase of either OS/2 1.x or OS/2 2.x.

Here's another example for you - FreeBSD can quite happily run Linux binaries, often faster than Linux can natively. This does not mean that FreeBSD is somehow a derivative of Linux, it just means that FreeBSD is able to emulate Linux's API(s). Heck, WINE lets you run Windows binaries on most unixes, but that doesn't make any of them derivatives of Windows. Similarly with filesystem support, both FreeBSD's and Linux's support of FAT does not in any way make them derivatives of DOS.

OS/2 and NT *are fundamentally different OSes*.

My point here was that at this point in time, this was NOT a generic concept. (to the best of my knowledge) the concept of lightweight processes viz threading was originated in OS/2 and carried into NT, as was the DLL DynaLink Library concept.

I think you'll find the concepts of both threads and shared libraries were around a long time before OS/2.

You might find the following pages interesting: One. Two.

There is significant evidence that NT 3.1 (and later) Windows 32-bit APIs were influenced by OS/2 's design.

I wonder if this "It Just Works" campaign is coming about along with a series of tangible products that will culminate next year with Longhorn. What I mean by this is the StartSomethingPC site I'm sure everyone here is familiar with, and the strong rumor that this mystery product (set to be unveiled on Monday April 25, is the Athens PC they first showed at the May 2003 WinHEC. I doubt it's a coincidence.

"After months of keeping its prized cow in the barn..."

In keeping with the analogy, this OS is truely a hefer.

Robocopy's a good alternative to rsync if you're after basic capabilities and only running Windows (and don't need compatibility with an rsync server). It's in the Resource Kit - 99% sure that the 2003 RK version is backwards-compatible so go for that one (as you can download the 2003 RK rather than having to order a CD for the 2000 one). More here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?Fa milyID=9d467a69-57ff-4ae7-96ee-b18c4790cffd&displa ylang=en
http://www.ss64.com/nt/robocopy.html
http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Print.cfm?Art icleID=39119

I, for one, welcome our new DRM encryption overlords! Perhaps they'll do better than our previous overlord, Chief General CSS. It only took seven lines of code to bring him down...

Read Windows NT and VMS: The Rest of the Story
Just because marketing says it's "new technology" doesn't make it so. NT originally referred to the codename N-10 Intel i860 CPU that it was going to run on.

If I run a malware email attachment as a normal user on my Windows box, it can damage at most that user's profile. That user doesn't have permission to write to anything outside their profile, and so can't damage anything else. Before it can even run, the directory or hash for the binary can't be on SRP's blacklist and the user needs file execute permission.
Although SRP wasn't introduced until XP, everything else has been true since the first version of NT. Show me malware that can bring down an entire Windows system when run as a normal user.
If you're running it as admin, then that's the first problem, isn't it?

Then you would be correct. Many of the original NT designers worked on VMS at DEC, including their lead architect.

Here's the story: http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Index.cfm?Iss ueID=97&ArticleID=4494

I believe he's actually referring to a Windows 98 bug that has been fixed for over 5 years now.

Oddly searching for "windows 98 reboot bug" brought up way too many irrelevant references.. who would have guessed that windows, reboot, and bug would be on the same page?

http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/ArticleID/1854 0/18540.html

The conclusive evidence is that OS X is a flavour of *BSD.

And Windows NT/2000/XP are "flavours" of VMS and don't stay up for fractions of the time...

The only things centralized about the registry are that it has a single database server that does the actual file writes while providing a high level API, and it has a single-root hierarchy.
Data in the registry is stored in hives mounted at various places in the registry's hierarchy. The registry's root is a key named \REGISTRY in the Object Manager's namespace. Win32 confuses things a little by renaming \REGISTRY\MACHINE to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE and \REGISTRY\USER to HKEY_USERS, and providing some pseudo keys, like for the current user, but the idea is the same. The RegLoadKey, RegUnLoadKey and RegSaveKey functions can be used to dynamically mount, unmount and copy hives in the registry. The key \REGISTRY\MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control \hivelist contains a list of all the hives to be automatically mounted at startup. Go ahead, divide the registry into as many hives as you want, and put them where ever you want.

What I'm trying to say is that the registry is no more centralized than the VFS is in Linux. The registry consists of various hives mounted at different locations, just like the VFS consists of various filesystems mounted at different locations.

As for messyness, is this due to the structure of the registry itself, or Microsoft's usage of it: do you really think that if Windows used an /etc it would be any better documented or organized?
Personally, I don't think the layout is all that bad.

Autoplay sues Microsoft, regarding a patent on automatically executing installation programs on CD-ROMs and other devices.

Timeline Inc. successfully sues Microsoft over breach of licence for three patents concerning SQL Server. Timeline actually threatened to sue third party developers and customers using Microsoft's product. Fortunately, they never followed through on those threats.

Microsoft settles with Intertrust, after losing a preliminary ruling to Intertrust. The lawsuit was based on Intertrust's DRM patent portfolio.

Here's a flashback to 1999. (Wooo, all those years ago!)

LinuxPPC: "Crack our box."

We (LinuxPPC Inc.) announced that in response to the LinuxPPC Security Challenge, a competition to break in to a computer running LinuxPPC 1999. The target computer is running the standard installation of LinuxPPC 1999. The target box has the Apache web server and telnet services turned on. Sendmail and FTP are not activated yet.

The contest was announce in response to Microsoft's Window 2000 security challenge, which has a box running a Windows 2000 beta, we were going to put a PowerMac 9500 up running LinuxPPC 1999. While only HTTP is running on the Microsoft box, to make things more interesting, the LinuxPPC box had telnet service active, opening another possible door for endeavoring network security enthusiasts to break in.

To make things interesting, we even gave out the root password.

So what happened? A deserving LinuxPPC hacker, don't recall who, exploted a flaw in the FTP server (ProFTPd?) and got in, modifying the index.html file. He rightfully won the 9500, and Microsoft had a little more egg on its face.

IIRC the Xbox Console USM ships with the Thompson DVD drive standard, pictured here in middle. The Thompson drive costs much less than the Hitachi, Samsung, or Phillips drives that can also be used. But some of the Thompson drives have problems. These problems don't show up with games written on single layer (orig Halo, JSRF/Sega, D&D Heroes, etc.), only with games written in 2-layer DVD (LOTR Third Age, KOTOR II, GTA:SA, etc.). The problems require a multimeter and Torx drivers to fix and you can't do it yourself without voiding the warranty. The returns and rumors are hurting sales in some places, and Microsoft's corporate tools are unable to FUD their way out of it. But if your local supplier happened to get USMs with the higher quality drives, then he has no idea a problem exists. Then when Microsoft adjusts shipping amounts across the board, suppliers who never experienced the problem complain about a conspiracy.

I found myself in the unfortunate circumstance where my games (all single layer) worked until the warranty expired, at which time I rented a scratchless KOTOR II, watched it hang repeatedly, and finally learned the truth. My single layer games still played fine.

Just for fun, didja notice the gamasutra article links to itself? I clicked for hours watching the banner ad change, and it was almost as fulfilling as finishing Fable.

True. Netsh is a great tool.

But try scripting this:

You want to add an IP address to IIS5's block list.

How do you do it using only the command line?

For instance it might have updates to nslookup.

And to the EULA.

Disclaimer: Evil EULA appeared to be fixed in W2KSP4.

This article is dead wrong, and anyone who actually has used the beta version of Longhorn could tell you.

This article actually has a hands on review of the graphics subsystem.

http://www.windowsitpro.com/Articles/Index.cfm?Art icleID=38925&DisplayTab=Article

Paul Thurrott is on my jackass filter. He acts like he's respected Windows authority. My favorite Thurrott brain fart was his diss of Ars Technica in response to Ars announcing the OEM availability of Windows Media Center Edition.

Here's part of the diss:

Ars Technica's continued insistence on referring to "retail shrink-wrapped" versions of XP MCE 2005, despite corrections from both official sources at Microsoft and from me, speaks volumes about the site's credibility. That said, enthusiasts who are willing to put up with a lot of missing features (and willing to lie about their status as system builders, ahem) can, in fact, purchase the OEM version (not a supported retail version) of XP MCE 2005 from online resellers

He believes that he can attack our credibility because he believes that the word "retail," which never appeared in the original report, excludes the likes of the thousands of hardware and software sites that do, in fact, sell OEM materials to anyone...

Mr. Thurrott is likely unaware of the fact that our audience is well accustomed to the practice of buying OEM hardware...

Mr. Thurrott, nonetheless, reported that we had received corrections from Microsoft and failed to act on them. This is, unfortunately, a lie. How Mr. Thurrott claims to know who has and has not contacted us remains a mystery, but his willingness to make false statements about the actions of our publication are rather alarming. Mr. Thurrott is correct that he himself had e-mailed us with his own account, but Mr. Thurrott does not work for Microsoft (despite mean-spirited rumors), and Mr. Thurrott has also been incorrect in the past...

More importantly, if Mr. Thurrott cares to cast aspersions on the credibility of Ars Technica, he might consider his own credibility when he decides to label as liars the thousands and thousands of people who legally and ethically purchase OEM products.

...Telnet from a CMD.EXE prompt, since even HyperTerminal has vulnerabilities and most of the alternative products are communists (although maybe that's just how Bill pronounces "communities").

If you want to poke fun at the whole idea, buy one of these (buttons coming when I can figure out what to fit in a 2.25" circle).

Actually, XP=NT 5.1. There were only incremental changes over 2000. Most of it cosmetic. 2k3=NT 5.2. I think Longhorn is what is slated to use version 6 of the NT kernel.

Ok, I'm scaring the bejesus out of myself for knowing this since I don't even run these at home (suse for the desktop - Fedora for experimenting). Well, I guess I do have to know some of this stuff from work, but only in a tangental way...

Ummm, Windows 2000 DOES use the NT kernel, version 5. Before marketing renamed it to 2000, it was going to be called NT 5.0. here's a link.

Interesting. On an unrelated note, did you know that the Slammer virus that crippled the internet exploited a flaw for which a patch had been available for nearly 6 months?

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Get a free LCD monitor!

A simple search on a search engine or a visit to any of the major security websites will document some of them.

Just in my other browser tab I have been reading the article on 10 newly discovered holes: http://www.windowsitpro.com/Article/ArticleID/4450 2/44502.html

Feck! Not any more ..

From Paul Thurrot's excellent WinINFO Daily (27/9/04):

Microsoft Nixes Outlook, Outlook Express Access to Free Hotmail Accounts

Citing concerns about spammers abusing the service, Microsoft will announce today that the company is dropping a feature from its Hotmail service that lets nonpaying customers access their Hotmail email from Microsoft Office Outlook and Outlook Express. The feature is based on a technology called Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV), an extension of the HTTP protocol on which the Web is based.

"Since we implemented Human Interactive Proof (HIP) to ensure that only humans and not automated systems were opening Hotmail accounts, spammers have found other ways to go after the system," MSN Lead Product Manager Brooke Richardson told me in a prebriefing Friday. "Recently, there's been an increase in exploits of the WebDAV protocol, which is used to enable people to access Hotmail from Outlook and Outlook Express. We've offered [this access] for free for some time, although it's typically a feature that other email providers charge for. But because of the rise in abuse of this protocol, we're making a change to WebDAV to curb abuse. Over the next few months, we're transitioning WebDAV to be available only to customers of our subscription services, such as Hotmail Extra Storage and MSN Premium. We expect this change will help us to more effectively stop spam emanating from Hotmail."

Richardson said that only a small percentage of free Hotmail account holders use the WebDAV feature. "About 5 to 10 percent of people have it set up," she said, "but most don't use it. And among that group, most activated it once, then never used it again. About 95 percent of our users don't use the feature." Richardson was also careful to note that this change doesn't mean that Microsoft is walking away from its nonpaying users. "We continue to invest heavily in Hotmail," she said. "We've recently instituted antivirus scanning and cleaning and brought back the [free] MSN Calendar. And we're actively moving free customers to the new storage allotments we announced earlier this summer." Richardson said that the company will upgrade storage allotments for all free Hotmail accounts by the end of the year. Microsoft has already upgraded paying customers, such as those who opted for Hotmail Extra Storage, she said.

Microsoft won't immediately shut off nonpaying users who have enabled Outlook or Outlook Express access to Hotmail. Instead, the company will phase out those customers over several months and give them plenty of warning that the change is coming. "Free Hotmail customers who want to use WebDAV have two choices," Richardson said. "They can opt for Hotmail Plus, which offers 2GB of storage space and 20MB attachments for just $19.95 a year. Or they can subscribe to MSN Premium." Microsoft will continue to enable WebDAV for customers of both products, she said.

PSdiE

Feck! Not any more ..

From Paul Thurrot's excellent WinINFO Daily (27/9/04):

Microsoft Nixes Outlook, Outlook Express Access to Free Hotmail Accounts

Citing concerns about spammers abusing the service, Microsoft will announce today that the company is dropping a feature from its Hotmail service that lets nonpaying customers access their Hotmail email from Microsoft Office Outlook and Outlook Express. The feature is based on a technology called Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV), an extension of the HTTP protocol on which the Web is based.

"Since we implemented Human Interactive Proof (HIP) to ensure that only humans and not automated systems were opening Hotmail accounts, spammers have found other ways to go after the system," MSN Lead Product Manager Brooke Richardson told me in a prebriefing Friday. "Recently, there's been an increase in exploits of the WebDAV protocol, which is used to enable people to access Hotmail from Outlook and Outlook Express. We've offered [this access] for free for some time, although it's typically a feature that other email providers charge for. But because of the rise in abuse of this protocol, we're making a change to WebDAV to curb abuse. Over the next few months, we're transitioning WebDAV to be available only to customers of our subscription services, such as Hotmail Extra Storage and MSN Premium. We expect this change will help us to more effectively stop spam emanating from Hotmail."

Richardson said that only a small percentage of free Hotmail account holders use the WebDAV feature. "About 5 to 10 percent of people have it set up," she said, "but most don't use it. And among that group, most activated it once, then never used it again. About 95 percent of our users don't use the feature." Richardson was also careful to note that this change doesn't mean that Microsoft is walking away from its nonpaying users. "We continue to invest heavily in Hotmail," she said. "We've recently instituted antivirus scanning and cleaning and brought back the [free] MSN Calendar. And we're actively moving free customers to the new storage allotments we announced earlier this summer." Richardson said that the company will upgrade storage allotments for all free Hotmail accounts by the end of the year. Microsoft has already upgraded paying customers, such as those who opted for Hotmail Extra Storage, she said.

Microsoft won't immediately shut off nonpaying users who have enabled Outlook or Outlook Express access to Hotmail. Instead, the company will phase out those customers over several months and give them plenty of warning that the change is coming. "Free Hotmail customers who want to use WebDAV have two choices," Richardson said. "They can opt for Hotmail Plus, which offers 2GB of storage space and 20MB attachments for just $19.95 a year. Or they can subscribe to MSN Premium." Microsoft will continue to enable WebDAV for customers of both products, she said.

PSdiE