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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'...
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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Why would anyone ever want to clone Windows?
Oh I don't know. How about using a lot of hardware that doesn't do jack shit under linux ?
Especially audio hardware. Not your consumer oriented crap obviously. And video editor suits etc...
And frankly having a windows clone is as good as having a dos clone.
We can replay all those great pc games (that newer generations don't even know because all they get nowadays are shitty console ports of shitty games).
More choice is good, and even better the day my windows programs will not be taken hostage by Microsoft.
So go ReactOS developers, make the dream come true.
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
I am quite happy someone wants to clone Windows to the point where a user can't tell that MS Windows has been replaced by ReactOS.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
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.
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
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....
Why couldn't you use a real Windows installation for those tasks?
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".
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.
With the current Gnome Shell/Unity trauma, users find the familiar UI of ReactOS Explorer comforting? :)
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
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
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.
paying 100 euros for a restrictive license is a bit too much. tied to one computer, and over restrictions - remote use is forbidden unless you've strictly got one user running, for one thing. all so that I can play quake 2 and quake 3 based games, etc. again. or even play a doom source port, which does not even runs correctly under linux - a long time bug prevents from using soundfonts with the timidity synthesizer and the default midi is horrendous crap with missing instruments.
I would like a working ReactOS, this would give a lot of the benefits of a linux Operating System, but with working games! and applications such as Ableton, etc. Really, in the end, the benefit of open source for the end user is it's like you have an unlimited, free pool of Windows Server Enterprise Edition licenses and secondary client access/terminal server licenses. or the fact that you can refurbish old computers. a pentium 3 is better and cheaper than a raspberry pi and runs well with a debian/ubuntu variant with the LXDE desktop ; ReactOS would be a fine alternative. though actually, an old PC (10 years and more) will take windows 7/8 as long as it has 768MB or more memory - if you're willing to either use a cracked version or buy a 100 euro license for a computer that's worth maybe 20 euros.
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."
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."
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.
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.
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.
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."