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ReactOS Presented To Russian President Putin
An anonymous reader writes "While President Putin was touring the area of Seliger Youth Forum, Marat Karatov demonstrated what can only be described as a fair amount of daring when he called out to the president and requested to present ReactOS to him. Putin agreed, and the project has now presented ReactOS to two successive Russian presidents. Putin responded to the presentation by stating he would think on it."
Well, as long as they don't criticize Putin in any way, they should be fine. Otherwise their OS will be banned and they will be sentenced to 10-20 years in Siberian prison for patent infringement or minor tax fraud.
Just sayin'...
Why would anyone ever want to clone Windows?
It's funny how their site states that all *nix is old crap based on a [sic] 30 year old architecture, whereas ReactOS has been in Alpha state for 16 years and based on a 31 year old architecture.
I guess the best way to deal with ReactOS is to simply IgnoreAndHopeItGoesAwayOS.
p.s. Wine on old crappy *nix has better support for Windows.
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Unbelievable!
Next step: a president taking decisions on programming patterns!
Yeah!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
Not really. Russia is a very, very big country.
Hell, I've seen some bus trips across Turkey into neighbouring countries that'll do 1600km in roughly two days or so. These would be rather short compared to what is probably required in some areas of Russia.
worldmobilenet.com -- World Prepaid Wireless Internet plans
You'd think you could do what Microsoft was too dumb to try and make a sandbox mode where .exe can't touch things it can't. The easiest way would be to restrict things from getting outside it's install directory, and to make a fresh registry for every application. A lot of .exes wouldn't work, but if they were trusted, you could turn off sandbox. And the future of .exe development would involve working in a single directory.
.exe. Viruses you get from buffer overflows. Viruses you get from 0 day problems. Microsoft keeps complaining that they can't compete on the online world, but maybe it is because they don't realize the beginning is a secure OS that is safe to run on the Internet.
Am I naive to think the problem is so easy to solve? The problem being rampant viruses on Windows. Viruses you get from running an untrusted
God spoke to me
Isn't one Win*OS enough to cause misery and pain? Why do we need these clones?
I am quite happy someone wants to clone Windows to the point where a user can't tell that MS Windows has been replaced by ReactOS. Sort of like a Folger's commercial from way back when.
If they ever complete the project and get a viable version of it, then they have produced a version of Windows that can be run by anyone anywhere without violating Microsoft's copyright etc. It might piss of MS but it would mean and end to them pointing out how popular software piracy is based on the number of illegal copies of MS Windows there are out there, particularly in the third world.
It would also open the door to fixing a lot of the problems that MS ignored, and perhaps they are doing this as they develop it for that matter.
I can't see more free software hurting in any way at any rate, and this lets people capitalize on all the useful software they may currently rely on without having to change or learn new things. User's don't seem to like learning new things unless they are trivial to absorb.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
This is UNIX vs VMS all over again.
I don't think that cozying up to a "president" that is in full swing of turning his country into a plutocrat dictatorship and police state while eliminating all opposition is the kind of publicity you want.
Australia's pretty big too, we've (apparently) got a bus service from Broome to Perth that's about 2200km with almost nothing in between. We have longer roads, but no regular bus service that I could find.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
Marat however pulled through, taking a bus approximately 2000 kilometers to make it in time...The project would like to thank...Marat for making the day long bus ride back to Seliger
ReactOS is just a cover. The real story here is a bus that doesn't stop every hour so the driver can get out and smoke cigarettes.
I am literally 3000 tokens away from the chaotic crossbow --Stephen
IgnoreAndHopeItGoesAwayOS not yet implimented
I once took a bus from Seattle to Pittsburgh, about 3500km.
Sitting on a bus for three days, non-stop, was ... not so fun... :(
[Very long-distance trains, by contrast, are actually quite fun, even in the U.S. and Canada where they're pretty slow; rail's great way to travel if you've got some time...]
We live, as we dream -- alone....
ReactOS isn't just about running .exe's. If that's all you want to do, then WINE is probably what you want (my understanding is that ReactOS and WINE share code to some extent). ReactOS is also able to handle Windows drivers, which WINE cannot handle, allowing for a more complete emulation of Windows.
That said, there's no reason why you couldn't do AppArmor-style security (which is what it sounds like you are describing) on top of something like ReactOS. In fact, there's multiple third-party applications that do it for Windows.
The "ignore and hope it goes away" mentality is why it has been in development for 16 years and the progress is so slow. The average Windows user doesn't even know what source code is, and the average Linux user seems to have some sort of hate for Microsoft and everything they do. Which means Windows users don't care, and Linux users hiss like a cat at the mention of the project. That leaves a very small amount of people interested in the project, out of which only a handful have the experience to get involved in the development.
The idea of ReactOS is to be able to reuse the user software, but more importantly the drivers, since most of the consumer devices have Windows drivers that work properly and are supported by the companies that built the device. And do that while reimplementing as many of the system libraries as possible in open source code.
I will admit that I AM biased towards the Windows side of the OS world, nowadays. Part of the reason is that for whatever reason all my attempts at using Unix-based/inspired OSes (that includes multiple flavours of Linux, and Mac OS X) since around the year 2000 have ended in a lot of frustration and me having to repartition my HDD and put the latest version of Windows at the moment back in the HDD. But even when things still appeared to work, I have never been able to agree with the ideas of the POSIX design. That means I am interested in the ReactOS project, and I wish they had more people and resources so they were able to advance faster, and I even donated some money for it, but unless a lot more people to the same, or some organization decides to invest in the project, it will continue to be only a "semi-obscure OS that most people just ignore or hope it goes away".
Wasn't this from about a year and a half ago, or did it happen again?
It should show up in related stories, but that'd be asking too much.
It's funny how a lot of people who seem to be American do not seem to get that for a large part of the world the USA is a threat as well as a promise. It's the butt headed attitude that the Roman Empire got into - we are the bringers of civilisation, everybody must love us. Only it turned out that the Goths didn't want it.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Putin responded to the presentation by stating he would think on it.
Awwwwwww, that always means no!
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
Australia's pretty big too
Uhm.. Russia goes all the way from Finland to Japan, or from Turkey to Alaska if you wish. It goes almost half circle around the north pole.
To say that Australia is pretty big in that context is like saying that a koala is pretty big when talking about bears.
Nowadays you don't have to reformat your HDD all the time, just use VMs. I have a Windows XP VM and a Mint VM that I use with Windows 7 as the host.
which is totally what she said
To put that in context, Australia is roughly as big (slightly smaller) as the 48 contiguous US states.
For anyone that wants to try ReactOS out, I highly recommend the ARWINSS fork, which is a new Win32 subsystem for ReactOS that reuses as much Wine code as possible. The ARWINSS architecture implements APIs exposed via USER32 and GDI32 libraries and is based upon Wine source-code. In my testing the stability and compatibility was much better then the official release. You can find it here:
http://www.reactos.org/wiki/Arwinss
That has got to be a typo! :O
In Britain there's a bus service from Inverness to London, taking 12½ hours to travel 900km (the train takes 8 hours, driving a car about 9).
I can't find a much longer journey even if leaving the country (which has at least a 30 minute break while going through the Channel Tunnel). London to Berlin is about 1100km, anything further than that requires a change. However, less-densely-populated continents could easily just change the driving crew.
Russia is about 2.2x the size of Australia. I think you've been fooled by map projections.
Hey hey ,don't knock VMS! It was relatively simple. Case-in-point (stolen from http://andyxl.wordpress.com/2011/09/04/ancient-vms-vs-unix-joke/)
A young scientist has an urgent job to finish, but disastrously the whole departmental network goes down apart from one ancient VAX. He hears there is an old-timer a few corridors away who still knows how to use the VAX, so he rushes down, bursts in, and insists that the old guy shows him what to do, because, you know, sorry, but this deadline is really important.
“Calm down”, says the old guy, “what do you want to know ?”
“Well, ok, for instance, how do I edit a file ?”
” You type EDIT FILENAME”
“Right, fine, suppose I want to make a copy ?”
“You say COPY FILENAME1 FILENAME2
“Err, right, ok, now suppose I need to delete the file ?”
“You say DELETE FILENAME”
“Ah, right, right, err.. now what if I want to print it ?”
“You type PRINT FILENAME”
“But what if I just want to see it typed onscreen ?”
“You say TYPE FILENAME”
“What if I need to figure out what a command does ?”
“You say HELP COMMANDNAME”
“Ummm.. umm. suppose I want to create a new directory ?”
“You use CREATE/DIRECTORY”
“Ok, ok, but look – how the hell am I supposed to remember all that ?”
Russian government already thought about it, and after long consultation with the industry techs and the government officials, instead of funding Wine they decided to fund Vodka.
Now that's what I would call the bus ride from hell.
Whenever I hear or read a news story about Putin I always end up being reminded of Lord Vetinari, Patrician of Ankh-Morpork.
There are a lot of extant programs that don't have *NIX versions and for which the source code isn't available. Let's take Office 2000...please. Let's assume that I am the Russian Government and I have cracked copies of, I don't know, older Photoshop, Office, you name it.
Now someone gives me an OS that runs all those programs but to which I have the source code. Which is easier: to add required new functions to the OS, or to write an OS from scratch that will run all those programs, or to reverse engineer all those programs? Perhaps I don't want the Civil Service running on LibreOffice because all the people who matter are trained on Office 2000. I don't care if the rest of the world is on Windows 9: what I care about is that all my bureaucrats and schools across a vast country are running something which runs my programs with my controls. I can develop new programs and know they won't be borked by OS changes.
Why should I care what Microsoft does? My users are writing Cyrillic script with a whole lot of different cultural assumptions from the Microsoft target audience.
Having lots of brilliant programmers isn't the problem: at the end of the day it is business processes and users. If you are stuck with all those PhDs doing desktop support for Rubuntu (or Pubuntu perhaps), they can't be out there planning the cyber-destruction of the United States, can they?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
The answer to your rather stupid header is "Russians, of course". Are you a Russian?
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
A 2000km bus trip in the US is easy, or are you hung up on the km vs mi difference? Heck, a trip of 4000km by bus isn't unusual in the US.
This is Russia we're talking about - the driver likely just chain-smokes while driving.
More likely he was driving while drinking and chain smoking.
Yes, it has changed since the early 2000s. I have given up on installing "alternative" OSes natively, and I also keep a bunch of VMs instead, with Windows 7 as the host. I rarely use them, but I have an old XP installation, an Xubuntu installation, an then some other VMs I created for fun, like old alpha of Haiku, or Windows 98 SE.
In Pratchett's books, Vetinari travels the reverse way from, say, the Assads or Stalin. They start as probably quite well meaning and gradually become more paranoid, violent and repressive. Vetinari starts as a repressive ruler of a backward city state and, as it rapidly advances technically and socially, gradually becomes more liberal and devolves more power to the general public.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
Eurolines runs services from tip to tip of the continent, e.g. Southern Spain - Hamburg, 3000 km.
You'd think you could do what Microsoft was too dumb to try and make a sandbox mode where .exe can't touch things it can't.
Sandboxing has existed in Windows since Windows 2000 (see SAFER) and has seen updates in every Windows version since.
How far is that in leagues?
You are welcome on my lawn.
I have never been able to agree with the ideas of the POSIX design.
What do you dislike about POSIX? A also assume from your post that you prefer the Win32. How do you prefer it?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Russia (Just Russia not the whole of what was the USSR) is the worlds largest country 6,323,482sq miles (USA is 3,537,455)
The USSR was much larger, Kazakhstan one of the ex-Soviet states is the 9th Largest country ...
But Russia only has half the population of the USA ... so they are very spread out ...
Note From New York you can "only" go 4000 km in a straight line and not enter another country (or get to a coast), From Moscow you can go 6500 km inside Russia in a straight line and not enter another country or reach the sea ...
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
All of the reasons you state for the slow progress are true to some extent, but the reality is the project is really really difficult and they haven't done the best job. The win 32 api has been historically riddled with bugs, and is ever changing with every release of windows. Their target keeps shifting before they get close to their old target. Plus they actually froze the code for a year or two to make sure that their wasn't any actual windows code in their code base. I think Hurd will finish before they make it to beta. Heck Hakui went from nothing to a pretty decent beta with binary compatibility with BEOS 5 in less time, due to better documentation and a stable target.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
*giggle* Thanks, now I'm imagining a bunch of bearded, birkenstock-wearing nerds rolling around on their backs, high on catnip and batting at string...
I wasn't mentioning DOS, which is obviously a different architecture. I was referring to Windows 1, which DOES still have an impact on current Windows.. atleast as much as 40 year old Unix has an impact on current *nix.
Besides, the point was that it's just idiotic to call an OS architecture bad just because it is older.
Perhaps I should have made this point clearer; not all people seem to grasp the subtle concept of sarcasm.
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As a Linux user, I don't hate the project at all. My fear is that as soon as ReactOS became a decent replacement for Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 and started to gain widespread use, Microsoft would hit the project with a mountain of lawsuits. I believe the same is true for the Wine project ( which I assume you also know, winehq.org ) - Microsoft ignores them because they're not successful.
I had problems with Linux at home too. Recent versions have been getting successively easier to install properly and I've been getting incrementally better at diagnosing and fixing problems, and between the two gradual changes I've reached the point where it's my primary home operating system for several years. But I still maintain a windows partitions for games that won't run on Wine, or won't run well on Wine.
I'm biased towards the free software side of the world. All of my industry job experience has been at companies too small to spend the time and money on a central proprietary software licensing system and someone skilled enough to manage it. So every time we replaced a motherboard, or set up a new device, or re-image the hard drive on a laptop that got whacked when a user downloaded a rootkit, or configure a virtual machine we either need to jump through hoops and send Microsoft yet another payment or else use pirated license codes. When I set up a Debian server install, there's no licensing hassle. When I reinstall, there's no licensing hassle. When half a dozen people have defunct XRDP connections to the server and I try to log in, I don't get prompted to purchase more Terminal Server Concurrent Access Licenses (I think that's what TS-CALS stands for, I don't even remember).
Now, for someone not working in IT or maybe even working in IT at a company that can afford the 'correct' solution to these problems (a Microsoft certified somethingorother and a properly configured license management server) these issues never appear. The person buy the computer with Windows pre-installed, they click a few checkboxes to activate the license on a newly installed device, end of story. So I can see why those people view me and others like me and find my strong dislike for proprietary software as bizarre. But Microsoft licensing, and Crystal Reports licensing, and SPSS licensing, and Citrix licensing have combined to push me strongly into the Free Software Foundation supporter camp.
This page http://www.reactos.org/en/about_history.html talks about the history of ReactOS. Notice how it starts with "ReactOS project since 1996". Granted, not all of this was under the name ReactOS, but it was the same people. The page states that "In February 1998, ReactOS began.".
16 years is a reasonable number.
You use CREATE/DIRECTORY
What's intuitive about that, especially compared to all the others?
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Well, fortunately win32 will cease moving on them once XP finishes dying. Vista and up are not win32 based, so they can stop chasing the ball.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Why are we all beared and wearing birkenstocks? I don't even know what a birkenstock looks like, nor am I blessed with a full beard.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Smoking optional. There was probably an exhaust leak to cater to all your lung-destroying needs.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Indeed. 2000km is about 1200 miles. Interestingly the trip from Atlanta, Georgia up to Maine is closer to 1800. That's not even the full N/S length of the continental US, and the E/W length is much longer!
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
The vodka project doesn't look like it should require a lot of financial resources though.
Nowadays you don't have to reformat your HDD all the time, just use VMs. I have a Windows XP VM and a Windows 7 VM that I use with openSUSE Linux as the host.
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Feliks Dzerzhinsky has something to tell you...
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
Yes, it is a form of free speech. And in Russia you have no free speech, instead the careful speech let's you stay free.
..The operating system configures you. What we is really need is a super solid Linux distro named Putin. Of course, sudo would be aliased with putin, e.g. "putin do", and /dev/null would be /dev/oligarch. You wouldn't need a firewall if Putin was root -- and rootkits wouldn't even dare. And if you were running low on resources, you could just FSB into the NSA's data center and use their's. And yes, the bold is obviously obligatory.
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
Hey, statistically speaking...with all the people in Russia and the former soviet bloc, even "rare" isotopes are bound to be swallowed by at least a few people.
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
Don't instantiate Romney for the 2013 control function!
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
GENERAL PLYMKIN
Now what's wrong with this thing?
General Plymkin messes with the controls.
GENERAL PLYMKIN
Fucking windows 98!
General Plymkin has pulled the plug. He stands there with
the cord in his hands.
GENERAL PLYMKIN
GET GATES IN HERE!!!
BILL GATES walks in, escorted by two MILITARY GUARDS.
GENERAL PLYMKIN
YOU TOLD US WINDOWS 98 WOULD BE FASTER
AND MORE EFFICIENT WITH BETTER ACCESS TO
THE INTERNET!!!
BILL GATES
It is faster, over five million--
Plymkin pulls out a gun and shoots him in the head. Gates
falls to the floor, dead.
GENERAL PLYMKIN
Alright men, get lots of rest, and
prepare thyselves for battle!
My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
I never said you were. That's just the image that popped into my head. :)
Who needs drugs when your mind comes up with so many odd notions that any hallucinations would seem normal. ;)
Actually I wish the OEMs would pull another "gang of nine" and get behind ReactOS because it could finally force competition in the X86 market. You see ReactOS is basically trying to solve two VERY big problems with having an OS other than Windows, 1.-The sucktastic Linux driver situation and 2.- The millions of mission critical little programs that will never be ported to anything else.
Whether the community wishes to accept it or not these are bothe big problems in the X86 world. The amount of hardware for X86 is just insane, big names and small, cheap objects and specialized equipment costing tens to hundreds of thousands. Now before anybody says "But Linux has drivers!" sure you have SOME drivers, not ALL drivers. And how many of those SOME drivers are really good and stable, and how many are alpha quality buggy shit simply because the devs just don't have the time and/or access to the specialized hardware to make better?
And then there is the software. Linux is fine if all you want to do is either surf the web like grandma, or be a programmer, anything else? You are SOL. 50 billions txt editors but where is the medical transcription software? Specialized office management software that can compete with quicken/quickbooks? Parts management, 50 thousand medical programs, more niches and notches of software than any geeker programmer in Linux can ever imagine has been written for Windows over the years which is why MSFT has to spend so much time on backwards compatibility.
If you could fix these two problems then you could finally have competition in the X86 market. I'm sure some will say "Why should we care? ARM herpa derpa" and I'll tell you because Intel's Sandy/Ivy will drink ARM's milkshake while it cries like a little bitch, that's why. The IPC on even a midrange AMD stomps the dogshit out of ARM and frankly always will because ARM is designed for low power and when you've got heavy loads that need processing you don't give a shit about how little power it sips, you care about IPC. And with both Intel and AMD getting into the tablet phone space you frankly should care, because there are a hell of a lot of people that would like to run all those programs named above on a tablet that pops into a keyboard and becomes a laptop without the assraping prices we've seen in the past.
So X86 still matters, its still a billion dollar business, and if reactOS could get some love maybe it would be a one company show.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I really hope they don't. As time goes by it gets harder and harder and harder to run legacy apps on modern operating systems. ReactOS is a godsend for those who just want to keep that one ancient service alive. Having XP finally drop completely out of support will make Win32 support in ReactOS more critical, not less.
"Space Exploration is not endless circles in low earth orbit." -Buzz Aldrin
The 32 in Win32 doesn't mean 32 bits. It only means NOT 16 BIT. You use Win32 on 64 bit systems.
Gpl v2.
Nearly all code is C. C++ is frowned on in their codebase. Assembler only in places it is really, really needed.
They aren't very interested in usermode apps for the OS. Their philosophy is that app makers should target windows instead of ROS, and therefor be useful test programs for improving ROS functionality. They are still fiddling with what's under the hood, and aren't interested in new paintjobs at the moment.
This drives away most of the win32 developer crowd, because outside of redmond, there aren't many win32k kernel mode programmers.
I realize Microsoft can't get them on code copying or decompiling. But they can try to get them on software patents, copyright of APIs (even if it failed for Oracle when trying to sue Google, that does not mean it would fail for Microsoft), and probably other legal attacks we don't know.
I would love to be wrong. I would love for Microsoft to be unable to bother WineHQ and ReactOS because they're completely free to do what they want under fair use terms. But Microsoft isn't going to let a multi-billion dollar source of revenue walk away without taking every possible step to block it.
Just don't ask about navigating the directory hierarchy.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Believe me, that's not the problem.
The problem is figuring out the syntax for the path to your new directory. It's been a while since I last worked on VMS, but IIRC paths looked something like FOO$BAR[BAZ.QUUX.NEENER]WIBBLE:WOBBLE.DIR;42
Really. Although a directory might not have had the semicolon and version number, since directories, as best I can remember, were not versioned. Even for files you didn't have to specify the version if you just wanted the most recent one, which was frequently the case, especially when editing a file -- not specifying the version would result in a new version being automatically created when you saved your changes (the one feature of VMS that I would really like to have on Linux).
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
> The "ignore and hope it goes away" mentality is why it has been
> in development for 16 years and the progress is so slow.
Oh.
I thought that was because there are a grand total of eleven people in the whole world who have more than a passing interest in the project. (This figure is an estimate. It could be off by as much as 20%.)
The other seven billion of us (also an estimate) either like Windows well enough to want to use it, in which case we just use the version that comes pre-installed on every new computer, or else we don't like Windows well enough to want to use it, which sort of implies that we don't really want to use a third-party reimplementation of it either.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
I really do not think you quite get the commercial environment here.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
I don't know. I'm still working out the conversion to LoCs end-to-end.
Patents on Win32 (if there are any) are surely soon to expire. Copyright of APIs is a fail, as we've seen.
With respect to patents, the system is so screwed up that I'm confident Microsoft could dig up patents it's filed in the past 10 years and apply them to code they wrote 20 or 30 years ago.
The judge in the Oracle vs. Google case was very careful to state that any decision made was specific to that case and not copyright in general. Plus the judge in the Oracle vs. Google case was an entry level federal judge, so any precedent his court decisions set is relatively easy to overturn on appeal. If for example a higher tier court or of course the US Supreme Court made the decision, it would almost impossible to have it reversed.
Last but not least, Java has a quasi-open standard that anyone is free to implement (even if they have to pay Oracle a fucking fortune to get access to the test kit required to verify that a particular implementation of the Java Virtual Machine can legally use the 'Java' name), Microsoft's Win32 APIs do not have any similar open standard.
I'm not trying to play Microsoft FUD-monkey. I just figure that if ReactOS ever became a drop-in replacement for Win32, Microsoft would stand to lose billions of dollars in revenue. That would give them every incentive in the world to pull out all the stops to shut it down.