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Developer Releases Windows 95 OS as an App For Windows 10, macOS and Linux (betanews.com)
Mark Wycislik-Wilson, writing for BetaNews: Last year, developer Felix Rieseberg released Windows 95 as an Electron app to let 90s computer users relive their younger years. Now he's back with a second version of the Windows 95 app, and it's even better than ever -- gaming classics such as Doom and Wolfenstein3D are now included, for starters! Based on the Electron framework, Windows 95 2.0 is written in JavaScript, and is essentially a 500MB standalone virtual machine. The original release was lacking in a number of areas -- such as no sound or internet access. This second release is described as a "big update" and includes a web browser in the form of Netscape Navigator 2.0.
First, we have an OS that bounces back and forth between real and protected mode faster than Trump pounds out nonsense statements on Twitter.
It is also very much NOT designed with the modern internet in mind, and is no longer maintained for security updates, and has had assloads of malware, both from black hat groups and state intelligence agencies produced to turn it into their bitch.
And we are running it on the ELECTRON platform, which is a web browser hosted virtual machine environment... So we are basically putting the above horror show in direct contact with the internet...
AND incorporating content that might not be legally licensed to be bundled or distributed in this fashion.
What about this is a good idea again? I mean, I am practically speechless here.
I believe you are thinking of CIH 1019. It had a penchant for trying to over-write the system bios with crap, and killing motherboards.
It also liked to inject itself into every portable executable it could get disk access to, without changing the PE's file size, and thus liked to spread through poorly secured corporate LAN deployments like wildfire.
But you might also be thinking of Stuxnet and its derivatives. Those would have an absolute hey-day with a wide-spread install base of win9x instances in the wild.
Seriously, what are they thinking? There are so many good x86 emulator out there and they choose to make one in Javascript only to package it to run on desktops? That's a turducken of inefficiency and stupidity.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
This was apparently worthwhile to them.
Or do you mean they should work on a project worthwhile to someone else?
Electron is the embodiment of every joke about programmers being lazy ever made. It is an abomination. It and similar frameworks like CEF are the opposite of the direction we should be going in. It used to be that programmers actually knew how their hardware worked. It used to be they knew how their code interacted with a system. Now they have no idea and to save their ignorance just throw extra layers of abstraction at it until their code only has to interact with some weird Fischer Price idea of what a computer looks like. Want to go a step further? Develop your electron apps with NPM. Because being dependent on the cloud for your dependencies is such a great idea. I'm not saying everyone should only develop in assembly or even C. But these super high level languages that run in VMs are being horribly abused. They are inefficient, insecure and often the lazy ignorant assholes who make them cant even be bothered to write their JS clean. I would be more lenient if they tried to write smart code in a stupid framework but its stupidity all the way down. With great power comes great responsibility. The dev community has shown they can exercise the wisdom of a five year old who found daddy's gun. I'm hoping some spectre level exploit comes to light that ruins the whole concept so we can go back to writing software the right way.
Imagine if you yourself focused your talent on something worthwhile instead of posting on Slashdot. Like feeding children in Africa.
faster than Trump pounds out nonsense statements on Twitter.
You know what's funny? I support Trump, yet never bring him up unless it's directly pertinent to the topic at hand.
Yet people that hate him seem to want to talk about him all the time. If I have someone I really dislike, my goal in life is that I think about them zero. In fact my general goal in life is to think about politicians zero.
If nothing else for your own health forget about Trump.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
lol, no frills, straight to the point
....until somebody ports EMACS to it.
Lets put the Science back into Computer Science.
A good portion of Science is doing things that may not necessarily make a good product, but advancements and progress happen from learning from the action of doing this.
I have written hundreds of programs, that I play with, end delete, including small OS's, different data collection and storage methods, opening up a new language and see what I can do with it. Nothing that can become a product to sell, as there are already built applications which do the same job, or it just isn't fully baked.
But what that does is keep my mind sharp, and agile to the changing environment. We are going to dump this .NET stuff and switch to NodeJS. Thats fine, because I have played with NodeJS and have a good idea on what I am doing. We stopped dealing with SOAP and going towards Restful Web Services, that is good too, as I was already experimenting with them and know how to handle them.
This guy went a little further, and basically made a product out of it, which I expect he had learned a lot of it, and given an odd task he would probably be able to jump onto it.
Have we as Capitalist Americans become so jaded on the Economy that learning for the sense of learning is a foreign concepts. Are all our home improvements designed to increase the value of our home, not something we would like to have ourselves. Do all our hobbies need to have a measurable benefit to our lives?
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Or do you mean they should work on a project worthwhile to someone else?
Should? No. They didn't say anything about should. They said "imagine if". And I'm right there with them, imagining it. This project is senseless. At the end, it will be good only for bragging rights, but who wants to brag about doing something useless?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
could swear I saw something this 6 month if not even as long as a year ago, ..?
I'll still stick to Linux, though.
Well, at least we won't have to worry about it running too fast to play the games.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A trip down memory lane is fun and all; but the WWW in 2019 is all but completely cut off from older browsers. Basically anything that can't speak SSL3.0 won't connect to any ssl/tls servers; those which do speak ssl 3.0 still can't connect to much because most things need tls now. Even sites that would render (potentially) mostly live on servers that are now https only or just send a redirect to https for any http requests.
Essentially without a proxy server that can speak the down level protocol to the client while speaking newer protocols to the sever and NOT using CONNECT; its dead. TL:DR I don't think you can even visit slashdot.org with Netscape 2.0 without additional software to facilitate that.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
You know what's a really nice, responsive, fast OS? A clean install of Win95 on a Pentium 100 with 32 MB RAM. Add a few basic apps and it's still fine. Sadly, it gets worse over time, after a few months and after installing many apps. But a fresh install felt better than XP on a 1 GHz PIII. But my personal favorite for power, features, and stability was Windows 2000. All the good stuff from Win95/98, the stability of NT, and none of the gunk of XP. I used that for as long as it was viable. (Which is to say, about 5 years longer than anyone else did.)
I had Win95 on a Compaq 3060 and it was unusually stable for Windows. I used a batch file to log boots and uptime was typically a month or more. It was on 24/7 and I just darkened the screen when not in use.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
How do you know I don't feed children in Africa?
definition of "should":
"used to indicate obligation, duty, or correctness, typically when criticizing someone's actions."
The OP was definitely criticizing and was obviously indicating a "more correct" course of action. Therefore- the word "should" was entirely appropriate to describe that comment.
Ironically, your comment starts by saying that the word "should" was inappropriate- but then you proceed to describe exactly why you agree that they should do something else.
We get it. You think it's a waste of time.
Thankfully, none of us nerds have to consider the internet's opinion when deciding what we are going to create.
Whats next? ASCII Pr0n app for IOS?
Have we not evolved?
Or if the developer used a real programming language...
Well, every programmer probably works on fun projects on the side. Most of them don't submit it to Slashdot hoping to be validated. There should be a "News For Nerds" angle here, not just a "what are you working on this week?" chat over dinner.
Don't the children in Africa get their food shipped to their doorsteps from Amazon, or are they Luddites?
This is the hard lesson that everyone coming out of school needs to learn: logic and reason aren't used in the real world.
The only reason logic and reason are taught in school is so that they can be more easily recognized and avoided.
This electron "app" uses v86 which is an x86 emulator inside the V8 javascript engine (which does 99% of the "work" here). If you want to see live demos, check out https://github.com/copy/v86/. They've got Windows 1.01, Windows 95 and Linux 3 demos that run right in your browser.
What a useless attitude. If everyone act as you do then we wouldn't have half of the technologies we have today and would still be on 8bit micros. How can you be a programmer and have such a passive outlook on the world? Can't speak for everyone but most I know became coders because they wanted to fix the shitty software they saw. You might want to look for a career change if you are that burnt out and jaded.
Could have fed more if you didn't spend time posting this.
so what's the point? Windows 95 works almost perfectly under dosbox, without all the caveats of Riseberg's solution. and Windows 95 using a 500MB virtual machine? that's just silly.
Africa is a long way away. I can only go there a few weeks a year.