Windows XP In a Browser

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Posted by timothy on Thursday July 21, 2011 @05:58AM from the where-it-belongs dept.

An anonymous reader writes "JPC — the pure java PC emulator — has now been upgraded to JPC2, and can run WindowsXP inside the Java Applet sandbox."

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Wow, that sounds painful by jandrese · 2011-07-21 06:01 · Score: 5, Funny

I assume this is for those times where you want your Core i7 machine to run like a 486?

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1. Re:Wow, that sounds painful by JoeDuncan · 2011-07-21 06:02 · Score: 3, Interesting
  
  It'll come in handy to run those old DOS games that aren't properly clocked and run *way* too fast on modern machines....
2. Re:Wow, that sounds painful by jawtheshark · 2011-07-21 06:05 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  That's /really/ old DOS games (Think Alley Cat), and DoxBox handles those situation just fine. The later Win9x games (not runninig under DOS or the DOS4GW extender) were already correctly time. Well, I haven't ever encountered one that wasn't.
  
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3. Re:Wow, that sounds painful by ByOhTek · 2011-07-21 06:06 · Score: 2
  
  Since when did 486s use NEARLY that much energy?
  That's nothing 486-like at all!
  
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  Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
4. Re:Wow, that sounds painful by Hatta · 2011-07-21 06:26 · Score: 2
  
  Even games as recent as Wing Commander II (1991) relied on clock cycles for timing.
  
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  Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
5. Re:Wow, that sounds painful by sharkey · 2011-07-21 06:34 · Score: 2, Funny
  
  It's STILL faster than Vista, though.
  
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6. Re:Wow, that sounds painful by reeno49 · 2011-07-21 06:53 · Score: 2
  
  I thought we settled that with me promising to switch to Netscape.
  I knew you'd hold it over my head...
  
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  I should have been a girl, with the way I can dance... my moves are amazing!
7. Re:Wow, that sounds painful by Mr.+Vage · 2011-07-21 08:07 · Score: 2
  
  I can think of one. Grim Fandango has one area that you can't get out of if your processor is too fast. I had to run a program to chew up my processor cycles to get through it.
8. Re:Wow, that sounds painful by John+Bresnahan · 2011-07-21 08:45 · Score: 2
  
  Just tell him to get off your grass, and move on.
9. Re:Wow, that sounds painful by turgid · 2011-07-21 09:51 · Score: 2
  
  There was sufficient diversity in PeeCee hardware by 1991 (and I dare say that compilers were good enough to write games in portable high-level languages like C or Pascal) that clock cycle counting for timing was a bad idea.
  By then there were a plethora of different processors on the market and in use. Just in the PeeCee compatible world there were all of the intel processors (8086, 80286, 80386SX, 80386DX, 80486) and clones from NEC and AMD with different clock cycle counts per instruction, cache memory, different instructions being available, etc....
  Heck, if your game was written in C you might even have been able to (recompile and) run it on a 68000-based machine with hardware-accelerated graphics.
  1991 wasn't all that primitive.
  Now, 1981 is a different story... A hex loader was a luxury in those days and colour and sound was for posh people...
  
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Licensing issue? by Xocet_00 · 2011-07-21 06:01 · Score: 4, Interesting

This has to violate the license terms of XP.
1. Re:Licensing issue? by rbrausse · 2011-07-21 06:07 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  no, according to the EULA you are allowed to:
  
  You may install, use, access, display and run one copy of the Product on a single computer, such as a workstation, terminal or other device (“Workstation Computer”).
  I don't see any rationale why a virtualized environment isn't accepted as a computer - but you need for every instance a own XP license.
  If I remember correctly the EULA of Windows Vista (excluding Ultimate) forbade virtualization.
2. Re:Licensing issue? by blair1q · 2011-07-21 06:20 · Score: 4, Informative
  
  You don't purchase software. You purchase a software license. And a copy of the licensed software. You can sell the copy, but with it goes the license. This is an argument that was resolved in the licensor's favor half a century ago.
3. Re:Licensing issue? by blair1q · 2011-07-21 06:26 · Score: 2
  
  Doesn't say "instance." Says "copy." It'd be hard to have 500 tasks running if you could only have one instance of the task object, e.g.
  My computer is one box full of computer parts, regardless of how it gets configured by software.
  So if I create 500 VMs on one computer and run 500 instances of the Windows kernel, I'm not violating my license, as long as the instances were started from the same copy of the software on the HD.
  Unless the license explicitly says I can't.
4. Re:Licensing issue? by Mister+Whirly · 2011-07-21 06:33 · Score: 2
  
  MS never made such a "claim". The issue was with Windows validation - if you changed enough minor components, or a major component in your system, Windows would interpret that as being installed to another system. It happened to me once, and a simple 5 minute call to MS tech support cleared it right up. If anyone bought another license in this situation, they really should have called MS first.
  
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  "But this one goes to 11!"
5. Re:Licensing issue? by pavon · 2011-07-21 06:38 · Score: 3, Insightful
  
  To add to the above posters, the only instance in which Microsoft might choose to not authenticate your computer when this occurred would be if you had OEM Windows XP license, because you are not allowed to install that on any other computer than the one you bought it on. In practice they were pretty lenient, but the strict terms of the XP license did cause me to avoid it in favor of Win2k.
6. Re:Licensing issue? by Coren22 · 2011-07-21 07:28 · Score: 2
  
  All this really entailed was a 10 minute phone call to a toll free number where you spoke to an Indian guy named either George or Bob(...)
  It wasn't Sue?
  
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Re:Why? Support soon to cease. by Jeng · 2011-07-21 06:06 · Score: 2

Exactly what kind of support do you expect to get when you are running Windows XP in a browser window. Do you really expect MS to provide you support for such a non-standard instillation?

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NSFW? by pz · 2011-07-21 06:09 · Score: 3, Interesting

When I try to visit the linked page, I get ---
This Page Cannot Be Displayed
Based on your corporate access policies, this web site ( http://jpc2.com/ ) has been blocked because it has been determined by Web Reputation Filters to be a security threat to your computer or the corporate network. This web site has been associated with malware/spyware.
Threat Type: Othermalware Threat Reason: Hosted on IP controlled by a group or individual known to be malicious.
If you have questions, please contact your corporate network administrator and provide the codes shown below. Notification codes: (1, MALWARE, Othermalware, Hosted on IP controlled by a group or individual known to be malicious., BLOCK-MALWARE, http://jpc2.com/)
That does not inspire confidence.

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1. Re:NSFW? by Curate · 2011-07-21 07:41 · Score: 2
  
  What?!? So I've been hoarding .css files for nothing?
Yo dawg by logjon · 2011-07-21 06:22 · Score: 4, Funny

We heard you like bloat, so we put bloat in your bloat so you can wait while you wait.

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Re:Why? Support soon to cease. by Pentium100 · 2011-07-21 06:22 · Score: 2, Insightful

New does not mean better. New especially does not mean that the old device/version ceases to work.
My car is 29 years old, I record TV shows on a 15 year old VCR, I also have 40+ year old audio devices (a tape recorder and a radio). They all work quite well despite the fact that there are newer versions of these devices out.
Same thing with an OS. why should I spend money on new hardware and software when my current PC is good enough? Just because the new software is "new"? No.
Re:Really? by Infiniti2000 · 2011-07-21 06:50 · Score: 2

If I could see the page, I might comment on it!
Re:How deep can it go? by davidbrit2 · 2011-07-21 07:52 · Score: 4, Funny

It's like Matryoshka dolls, but each one has more devastating genetic deformities than its container. The one in the middle looks like the love child of the California Raisins and ET.
Can this really be called running in a browser? by MikeUW · 2011-07-21 09:47 · Score: 3, Insightful

If this requires a Java applet to run, then isn't the virtual PC essentially running in the Java runtime environment? Yeah, suppose you can do some stuff to make the browser interact with the VM and vice versa...but I don't think this really demonstrates anything special, other than demonstrating the ability to virtualize a WinXP machine in Java.
Of course, I haven't read the article...