So far i counted five cracks.
I am particularly interested because WGA does not recognise my copy of Win2k, a legitimate upgrade. So there is little left to do other than to patch it.
W
The latest versions of OS/2 do support things like USB, high-end video cards. Not sure on wireless networking, though.
The thing is that there is a distribution of OS/2 that is current technology. I installed it on the latest machine, with then 256 MB ram. It runs fast.
Out of the box, it detected the video card, and loaded the driver for it: this part is still actively being maintained.
Unlike Windows, it did not uncerimoneously go out and give every single drive a letter, and you can control what letters drives become.
You can even fit USB support onto OS/2 version 3, while Windows NT4 does not support it.
It still uses a text config.sys, and you can boot into a command line, and use editors to edit this file.
The creation of a boot cd-rom, or maintainence partition is better documented, and relatively smaller (eg bootable ), cf the reverse-engineered and large Windows process (bartpe). The thing is that one gets a decent shell and utilities under 50 MB [cf linux, eg dsl, insert], while bartpe and winpe typically weigh in at close on 150 MB. When you look at something like a 200 MB pocket cdrom, there isn't much change.
When playing londonopoly and you get "take a walk on the boardwalk" where do you go?
Advance token to Mayfair (site rental 50$, hotel $2000).
Seriously, when i look at the commemorative 50 year edition of monopoly, it is exactly the same as i grew up with, except they changed the street names. So mayfair becomes boardwalk.
The Commemerative 50th edition set, as well as the Australian sets from the fifties to seventies, all have the wording "take a walk on the broad walk, advance token to (Mayfair)", and no "Go back to (Old Kent Road)",
They also show the same pictures of the monopoly man doing the same things (eg pushing a pram along the broad-walk).
My brother has a german set, which features, among other things, go back to (old kent road), and "advance to (picadilly)".
We used to play monopoly (with heavily distorted rules) quite a lot, and even though i have not played it for yonks, i still know the complete order of the board, as well as the bare site and hotel rentals of all the sites.
The US names appear to be different, and appears to have not adopted the london set.
The game existed some time before parker brothers acquired it. google for "anti-monopoly" + board-game.
For those who have not seen a proper monopoly board, the streets are (by colour-group, from Go)
Old Kent Road, Whitechapel
The Angel of Islington, Euston Road, Pentenville Road
Pall Mall, Whitehall, Northumberland Ave
Bow street, Malborough street, Vine street
The Strand, Fleet street, Trafalgar Square
Leister square, coventry square, piccadilly
Regent street, Oxford street, Bond street
Park Lane, Mayfair.
The railway stations are in order, Kings Cross, Marylebone, Fenchurch Street, Liverpool Street.
Utilities are Electric Company and Water-Works.
You still have chance and community chest, with such joys as "go back three spaces", and "take a walk on the broad walk, advance token to mayfair", although not the German "go back to Old Kent Road".
One can also use the OS/2 paradigm on much of the Windows stuff, like I do. There are even DLL files, like Jeff Glatt's "filerexx.dll" that allow you to hook into the shell and registry.
The main trouble is that a lot of the CLI interfaces are not documented. Even going into the program to find switches for the program is a bit of a nuisance.
You can play around with sendkeys() or keystack to sent keystrokes to a command window, but even this interface might not be as robust as one hopes. This is the sort of interface they wanted to move people off. Lotus for DOS programmed using/FS~ to menu-file-save and press enter.
The OS/2 and Windows implementations of pipes is itself poor. I had pipes run, and then close the window.
The documentation on how to pass parameters to commands is abysmal. Unless you know the magic of putting a * after the association in registry, you won't be able to pass parameters to external scripts (eg myfile.rex 2+3)
The biggest fear that Microsoft have is that the OS will be "commoditised" (ie made replacable). The reason they went after netscape was that netscape threatened to reduce them to a (badly debugged) set of device-drivers.
Any effort to make the user interface and utilities unrelated to the underlying system will surely do this, to an end better than anything else.
Supporting different operating systems is a bitch, but the rewards are worth it no end.
It is interesting that while i had REXX first with OS/2, it was the DOS versions of Quercus that i used mainly. I have since phased out quercus for regina, because the latter supports the ANSI extensions.
REXX has good cross-platform support. That is, one can write a rexx script, and use it anywhere. It is also relatively tiny: the whole processor + script is tiny enough to fit on a floppy disk.
None the same, it makes no system-derived registry or config.sys changes, so it's handy to run in a repair environment.
With a couple of DLL files, one can do interesting and useful things to the OS/2 or Windows shell. I have a script that processes the OS/2 shell (replace long names with shorter ones), and a script that does Windows shells.
Rexx scripts can be used as a target for the OS/2 "extproc" process, a process supported by Windows. Unix has the "/#" convention or something.
This allows one to write rexx scripts as command processors, and write the input as batch files. REXX has some wonderful string handling, and makes then an ideal command processor language. Herein lies its power.
You can write some interesting command languages, starting from the relatively straight forward "simple list" to a more complex language supporting subroutines etc.
The simplest one has only one command, eg $$x. The idea here is that you insert lines into an RTF document, and then have rexx processs this as a batch. All lines are fed through to output, except for the $$x lines, which contain commands to calculate certian lines etc.
A program like this was simple enough to use and write, and useful enough for handling form-letters.
One can then do things like change the default action (handy, for example for stripping external comment), etc. So a nicely documented input file complete with debug elements becomes a single output text ready to run.
And yet it is ultimately the capacity to handle strings much easier, to deal with binary data, and to deal with big numbers, that makes REXX intensly powerful.
I am always pussled, why people who upload warez get charged for the number of downloads (rather than uploads). [i don't do warez, but curious]
Copyright infringement is about making copies. If i have a copy sitting on a warez server, then i made only one copy.
It is the downloader who makes copies of the stuff. Not the uploader.
The idea that an uploader is somehow like a counterfeit printer is wrong. If i print off 8000 copies of a book without permission, then i made 8000 copies of it, and 8000 copies are in my posession at some point. On the other hand, if i upload one copy of a program, then i make just one copy.
On the other hand, if i copy a cdrom from your collection, then it is not you that cops it but me. But in effect, all i have done is do a download, not an upload.
It would be nice to do copies for private use, because the medium is more critical than books. A book that is dog-eared and stained is still servicable, while a cdrom may not.
The secret about Knuth's Literate programming is not so much how he did it, but what he did. I have read much of the stuff on it, and found it to be fairly restrained.
I particularly wanted it for writing REXX scripts, but adapted it to write any text.
It has no "reserved characters". What it uses instead is the qTextq style (ie the reserved character is defined string by string). This means that one does not have the c:\\\\msdos\\\\dir style so beloved of microsoft.
I do add some string handling to the result: you could, type it as: #zc.,\,c:\msdos\dir,\\\\#,
which would change every instance of \ in the middle string into \\\\.
It supports variables as well. One can set something like !set ydir #c:\msdos## and it will work. It supports wing-comments, on either side, so you can write !! comment !!code
!! os2 apps !!set yos2app #d:\os2\apps##
!! dos apps !!set ydosapp #d:\mdos\apps##
!! win apps !!set ywinapp #d:\win\apps##
The bit on the left tells you what the line means. It's like a little table.
It supports something like ifdef, but you can reset the things on re-runs. Even this is done in an elegant way, since one might want to have embedded alternate values, without a bunching at the end.
In practice, the language is home grown. It handles a lot of nice things, and is designed so that the bulk of the discussed matter is live code. One might have a table of conditions: this can be set to be read direct into the output.
The same table, for example, might be called several times, each time evaluating something different. (ie you manage one table, and include/exclude things).
The actual code is done in Rexx, with most of the variables visiable most of the time. The output is not language-specific. One same source could put out an INI file, a REX script, a QBasic script, a.CMD file, and a readme file.
I have written programs in both raw and literate programming style, i prefer the latter. In fact, i wrote a literate-program pre-processor to write programs, and it made the program easier to write and more bug-free.
In literate programming, you rely on a pre-processor to make the output production, so you are free to put things together as you want.
What this means, is that bracketing code (eg open, close files), can be written in the same block, which are invoked separately.
The main program then ends up looking like a rough scetch, full of commands to include other bits. With wing comments, it is easy to see what is going on.
/* A rexx script */ !inc rexxsets ; standard settings !inc cmdopts ; process command line options !inc fileopen ; open files !inc mainprog; main program !inc closefile ; close files exit !inc subs ; subroutines
One uses a folding editor to search for strings like "!topic". This will not show you a consolidated index, but you can use it to also show where you're are, and any missing bugs.
On the main, Jon Bentley's comments on Literate Programming are fair (that is, it creates a good environment for writing single-purpose code), but one needs to consider the context the program is written for.
The form i use was specifically designed to allow all sorts of text-output, so the same file can make as output, eg.CMD,.REX,.TXT and.HTM output, which means that when you run the script you get a perfectly matched set of files, all correctly pointing to each other.
In australia, root has several meanings, not at all nice. The sense is similar to f**k.
to have sex for the animal pleasure
to stuff up
Accordingly something like root user has the connetation of one that roots your system.
SysIntern RootKitRevealer
I have a fairly typical multi-boot system, with two FAT16 partitions, a FAT32 partition, a reserved BeOS partition, a HPFS partition, and the usual swag of NTFS partitions.
The disk has been showing signs of corruption [bad sectors], and a replacement is in hand: already bought, but there are some backup questions.
RootRevealer had problems scanning registry. (i suspect one of the registristry hives is not well placed on the filesys). On the other hand, i ran the thing from BartPE, (it works), it revealed a whole swag of OS/2 binaries, but i don't know if OS/2 or Windows placed them there. They were meant to be there, by the way. Apart from the metadata files in each partition, there were error messages from non-accessable partitions (like F: (hpfs) and H: (unformatted = beos).)
I don't know about this one. The Barthomolews Atlas had a scheme where latitude and longitude were expressed in terms of an encoded number base 10, which is readily convertable to lattitude + longitude using alternate symbols.
So the idea of comingling lattitude and longitude is by no means new. Their system involved letters and numbers as well, so the first letter is one of 24 time-zones, the first pair of digits were 9's, and there after decimal division:
The only novelty here is the encoding in base 30, and i really can't call that "innovative".
Also, representing numbers in base sqrt(-3) will automatically encode a plane as an alternating set of numbers.
On the other hand, i used a system of calendar where 1 year = 12 months of 31 days, so you could store yymmdd in a 16-bit register, for a range of 178 years. (ie 178*12*31 > 65536), which is quite nifty.
Unfortunately, names like @7!44jN are not legal over here. So i can't really rename children after these.
{remark mode=funny}
On the other hand, i could be like catbert, and email out new names to unsuspecting americans, etc using the high security database at http://www.example.com/personalinfo.mdb {/remark}.
Power crash
Under a power crash situation, it prolly surfices to disengage the disks, with or without a graceful shutdown. This might involve flushing the core, etc. How should the computer know it's about to crash?
The macintosh dock
We had the same problem with OS/2, but IBM still supplied the older tool, and the means of restarting it (including an icon)
Grey Doubt
The menu could be hooked up to a pop-up dialog message, saying "you need x". It is still useful to gray it out.
Ascii sort
Ascii was around a century before computers, and adopted by computers via teletypes. Ascii sort is much faster (if counter intuitive). None the same, it is of course silly to have Z before a, but what happens when you hit welsh (which has ff as a separate letter?
Spaces in URLS
The whole point of punctuation is to separate words. Computers use extra punctuation to separate containers, etc. So if you start complaining about spaces, next you will be looking at "Financial Year 2004/05" as a name.
Data Entry fields
Valid enough point. One has to parse the field to store it. What do you allow?
Disk Drive Nazi
I suppose the author comes from the DOS world, where you can pop disks in and out willy nilly. It's a case of asking for the disk, really. Would be nice, if there was a list of open files given, or some option to forcably disconnect it. I suppose it's share and share alike, or manners, really.
It's important to remember, the first step that Microsoft used to "choke Netscape's air supply" was to drop the prices on their browser to $0.
At the time, the going rate for a top notch browser was 50$ a copy. Because MS could rely on other income, dropping the prices hurt Netscape more than it hurt MSFT.
So, yes, "free" can be preditatory pricing, especially if it is tagged to "non-free".
It's also how they killed off DRDOS (ie giving OEMs Windows + MSDOS at the same price as Windows itself.
In some countries, the use of DVD regions is held to be a sign of a cartel, and so it is not legitimate to provide this restriction...
So i suppose they can point to that...
BartPE is running on "miniNT", which has a thread limit of six, and also has some kind of time limit. So maybe this thing is some kind of WinPE environment with the shell soaking up three threads..
In any case, even with the default install of MiniNT, one hits the 5-process limit pretty quickly. Something like irfanview chews up two threads - it will load if it's the last thread but not showing its menu.
Of course, the BartPE world has got around this limitation, by spiking winlogon.exe one way or the other. For example, killing off in order, smss.exe and winlogon.exe apparently does wonders, as does loading the shell via peloader.exe (which makes some weird calls to dehack the resource feature).
The other thing is that it might be explorer itself doing this, but i think they're using a hacked shell on top of WinPE.
I have not seen the product, but the numbers that i hear are remenicent of WinPE.
Remember, also that lots of companies are outsourcing to save money etc. We note, for example, that Microsoft tarballs their windoze code back and forth between india and the us.
So there is room enough for one to make for cultural differences interfering in performance.
All one has to do with OSS, is hand-comb the source if it is a security issue: the source is there, and one can blend in acceptable bits.
Of course, security costs, and one have to have people doing this sort of stuff anyway for other things. If you're going to trust software to potentially billions of dollars of equipment, national security, and lives, i suppose it might be worth the effort.
My recollection was that was what the Russians did. A home-grown DOS that they had complete control and access to the code to. You don't need fancy guis for the systems: just a modular approach to the show.
Slashdot Mirror
It is aslo a useful cure for GOTO, and has an add-on object module. The language is also available for free from different sources.
So far i counted five cracks. I am particularly interested because WGA does not recognise my copy of Win2k, a legitimate upgrade. So there is little left to do other than to patch it. W
Out of the box, it detected the video card, and loaded the driver for it: this part is still actively being maintained.
Unlike Windows, it did not uncerimoneously go out and give every single drive a letter, and you can control what letters drives become.
You can even fit USB support onto OS/2 version 3, while Windows NT4 does not support it.
It still uses a text config.sys, and you can boot into a command line, and use editors to edit this file.
The creation of a boot cd-rom, or maintainence partition is better documented, and relatively smaller (eg bootable ), cf the reverse-engineered and large Windows process (bartpe). The thing is that one gets a decent shell and utilities under 50 MB [cf linux, eg dsl, insert], while bartpe and winpe typically weigh in at close on 150 MB. When you look at something like a 200 MB pocket cdrom, there isn't much change.
OS/2 v 4.0 appeared on a magazine cover over here in Australia, beside BeOS and some linux.
Advance token to Mayfair (site rental 50$, hotel $2000).
Seriously, when i look at the commemorative 50 year edition of monopoly, it is exactly the same as i grew up with, except they changed the street names. So mayfair becomes boardwalk.
They also show the same pictures of the monopoly man doing the same things (eg pushing a pram along the broad-walk).
My brother has a german set, which features, among other things, go back to (old kent road), and "advance to (picadilly)".
We used to play monopoly (with heavily distorted rules) quite a lot, and even though i have not played it for yonks, i still know the complete order of the board, as well as the bare site and hotel rentals of all the sites.
The US names appear to be different, and appears to have not adopted the london set.
The game existed some time before parker brothers acquired it. google for "anti-monopoly" + board-game.
The railway stations are in order, Kings Cross, Marylebone, Fenchurch Street, Liverpool Street.
Utilities are Electric Company and Water-Works.
You still have chance and community chest, with such joys as "go back three spaces", and "take a walk on the broad walk, advance token to mayfair", although not the German "go back to Old Kent Road".
The main trouble is that a lot of the CLI interfaces are not documented. Even going into the program to find switches for the program is a bit of a nuisance.
You can play around with sendkeys() or keystack to sent keystrokes to a command window, but even this interface might not be as robust as one hopes. This is the sort of interface they wanted to move people off. Lotus for DOS programmed using /FS~ to menu-file-save and press enter.
The OS/2 and Windows implementations of pipes is itself poor. I had pipes run, and then close the window.
The documentation on how to pass parameters to commands is abysmal. Unless you know the magic of putting a * after the association in registry, you won't be able to pass parameters to external scripts (eg myfile.rex 2+3)
Any effort to make the user interface and utilities unrelated to the underlying system will surely do this, to an end better than anything else.
Supporting different operating systems is a bitch, but the rewards are worth it no end.
REXX has good cross-platform support. That is, one can write a rexx script, and use it anywhere. It is also relatively tiny: the whole processor + script is tiny enough to fit on a floppy disk.
None the same, it makes no system-derived registry or config.sys changes, so it's handy to run in a repair environment.
With a couple of DLL files, one can do interesting and useful things to the OS/2 or Windows shell. I have a script that processes the OS/2 shell (replace long names with shorter ones), and a script that does Windows shells.
Rexx scripts can be used as a target for the OS/2 "extproc" process, a process supported by Windows. Unix has the "/#" convention or something.
This allows one to write rexx scripts as command processors, and write the input as batch files. REXX has some wonderful string handling, and makes then an ideal command processor language. Herein lies its power.
You can write some interesting command languages, starting from the relatively straight forward "simple list" to a more complex language supporting subroutines etc.
The simplest one has only one command, eg $$x. The idea here is that you insert lines into an RTF document, and then have rexx processs this as a batch. All lines are fed through to output, except for the $$x lines, which contain commands to calculate certian lines etc.
A program like this was simple enough to use and write, and useful enough for handling form-letters.
One can then do things like change the default action (handy, for example for stripping external comment), etc. So a nicely documented input file complete with debug elements becomes a single output text ready to run.
And yet it is ultimately the capacity to handle strings much easier, to deal with binary data, and to deal with big numbers, that makes REXX intensly powerful.
Copyright infringement is about making copies. If i have a copy sitting on a warez server, then i made only one copy.
It is the downloader who makes copies of the stuff. Not the uploader.
The idea that an uploader is somehow like a counterfeit printer is wrong. If i print off 8000 copies of a book without permission, then i made 8000 copies of it, and 8000 copies are in my posession at some point. On the other hand, if i upload one copy of a program, then i make just one copy.
On the other hand, if i copy a cdrom from your collection, then it is not you that cops it but me. But in effect, all i have done is do a download, not an upload.
It would be nice to do copies for private use, because the medium is more critical than books. A book that is dog-eared and stained is still servicable, while a cdrom may not.
On the other hand, things like yahoo won't even let you upload a .rar, so that's my work-around for it.
I looked at this, and first thought "british telecom"! oh well.
I particularly wanted it for writing REXX scripts, but adapted it to write any text.
It has no "reserved characters". What it uses instead is the qTextq style (ie the reserved character is defined string by string). This means that one does not have the c:\\\\msdos\\\\dir style so beloved of microsoft.
I do add some string handling to the result: you could, type it as: #zc.,\,c:\msdos\dir,\\\\#, which would change every instance of \ in the middle string into \\\\.
It supports variables as well. One can set something like !set ydir #c:\msdos## and it will work. It supports wing-comments, on either side, so you can write !! comment !!code !! os2 apps !!set yos2app #d:\os2\apps## !! dos apps !!set ydosapp #d:\mdos\apps## !! win apps !!set ywinapp #d:\win\apps##
The bit on the left tells you what the line means. It's like a little table.
It supports something like ifdef, but you can reset the things on re-runs. Even this is done in an elegant way, since one might want to have embedded alternate values, without a bunching at the end.
In practice, the language is home grown. It handles a lot of nice things, and is designed so that the bulk of the discussed matter is live code. One might have a table of conditions: this can be set to be read direct into the output.
The same table, for example, might be called several times, each time evaluating something different. (ie you manage one table, and include/exclude things).
The actual code is done in Rexx, with most of the variables visiable most of the time. The output is not language-specific. One same source could put out an INI file, a REX script, a QBasic script, a .CMD file, and a readme file.
I have written programs in both raw and literate programming style, i prefer the latter. In fact, i wrote a literate-program pre-processor to write programs, and it made the program easier to write and more bug-free.
In literate programming, you rely on a pre-processor to make the output production, so you are free to put things together as you want. What this means, is that bracketing code (eg open, close files), can be written in the same block, which are invoked separately.
The main program then ends up looking like a rough scetch, full of commands to include other bits. With wing comments, it is easy to see what is going on.
One uses a folding editor to search for strings like "!topic". This will not show you a consolidated index, but you can use it to also show where you're are, and any missing bugs.
On the main, Jon Bentley's comments on Literate Programming are fair (that is, it creates a good environment for writing single-purpose code), but one needs to consider the context the program is written for.
The form i use was specifically designed to allow all sorts of text-output, so the same file can make as output, eg .CMD, .REX, .TXT and .HTM output, which means that when you run the script you get a perfectly matched set of files, all correctly pointing to each other.
More exactly, the latest definition of the kilogram is "2 lb, 4 oz, 3 dwt, 7 mites 4 periots, 4 1/2 blanks, troy measure."
Root
In australia, root has several meanings, not at all nice. The sense is similar to f**k.
Accordingly something like root user has the connetation of one that roots your system.
SysIntern RootKitRevealer
I have a fairly typical multi-boot system, with two FAT16 partitions, a FAT32 partition, a reserved BeOS partition, a HPFS partition, and the usual swag of NTFS partitions.
The disk has been showing signs of corruption [bad sectors], and a replacement is in hand: already bought, but there are some backup questions.
RootRevealer had problems scanning registry. (i suspect one of the registristry hives is not well placed on the filesys). On the other hand, i ran the thing from BartPE, (it works), it revealed a whole swag of OS/2 binaries, but i don't know if OS/2 or Windows placed them there. They were meant to be there, by the way. Apart from the metadata files in each partition, there were error messages from non-accessable partitions (like F: (hpfs) and H: (unformatted = beos).)
I don't know about this one. The Barthomolews Atlas had a scheme where latitude and longitude were expressed in terms of an encoded number base 10, which is readily convertable to lattitude + longitude using alternate symbols. So the idea of comingling lattitude and longitude is by no means new. Their system involved letters and numbers as well, so the first letter is one of 24 time-zones, the first pair of digits were 9's, and there after decimal division: The only novelty here is the encoding in base 30, and i really can't call that "innovative". Also, representing numbers in base sqrt(-3) will automatically encode a plane as an alternating set of numbers. On the other hand, i used a system of calendar where 1 year = 12 months of 31 days, so you could store yymmdd in a 16-bit register, for a range of 178 years. (ie 178*12*31 > 65536), which is quite nifty.
Unfortunately, names like @7!44jN are not legal over here. So i can't really rename children after these. {remark mode=funny} On the other hand, i could be like catbert, and email out new names to unsuspecting americans, etc using the high security database at http://www.example.com/personalinfo.mdb {/remark}.
Power crash Under a power crash situation, it prolly surfices to disengage the disks, with or without a graceful shutdown. This might involve flushing the core, etc. How should the computer know it's about to crash? The macintosh dock We had the same problem with OS/2, but IBM still supplied the older tool, and the means of restarting it (including an icon) Grey Doubt The menu could be hooked up to a pop-up dialog message, saying "you need x". It is still useful to gray it out. Ascii sort Ascii was around a century before computers, and adopted by computers via teletypes. Ascii sort is much faster (if counter intuitive). None the same, it is of course silly to have Z before a, but what happens when you hit welsh (which has ff as a separate letter? Spaces in URLS The whole point of punctuation is to separate words. Computers use extra punctuation to separate containers, etc. So if you start complaining about spaces, next you will be looking at "Financial Year 2004/05" as a name. Data Entry fields Valid enough point. One has to parse the field to store it. What do you allow? Disk Drive Nazi I suppose the author comes from the DOS world, where you can pop disks in and out willy nilly. It's a case of asking for the disk, really. Would be nice, if there was a list of open files given, or some option to forcably disconnect it. I suppose it's share and share alike, or manners, really.
This particular article was accompanied with a graphic of the formula, which showed the equation with "20-sin(1-F/10)" for 1-sin(1-F/10).
it makes me no sense what the unit of the sine might be, but i suspect that it's supposed to represent coversine.
In any case, the equation can be written in a form that is dimensionally correct, by writing the equation in the form
(U+C+I)(D-S)/sqrt(2)D(1-sin(QF/D)),
U urgency 1..9
I importance 1..9
C complexity 1..9
S skill 1..9
F frequency 1..9
D denominator 10
Q full angle 90 deg
where D is the denominator of the scale. This means that if you make D=12, then everything still works out, if you rate the thing 1..11.
What is also missing is Q, the unit of angle representing a full range. According to the thing, it is open, but i suspect that Q = 1 quadrant.
At the time, the going rate for a top notch browser was 50$ a copy. Because MS could rely on other income, dropping the prices hurt Netscape more than it hurt MSFT.
So, yes, "free" can be preditatory pricing, especially if it is tagged to "non-free".
It's also how they killed off DRDOS (ie giving OEMs Windows + MSDOS at the same price as Windows itself.
In some countries, the use of DVD regions is held to be a sign of a cartel, and so it is not legitimate to provide this restriction... So i suppose they can point to that...
In any case, even with the default install of MiniNT, one hits the 5-process limit pretty quickly. Something like irfanview chews up two threads - it will load if it's the last thread but not showing its menu.
Of course, the BartPE world has got around this limitation, by spiking winlogon.exe one way or the other. For example, killing off in order, smss.exe and winlogon.exe apparently does wonders, as does loading the shell via peloader.exe (which makes some weird calls to dehack the resource feature).
The other thing is that it might be explorer itself doing this, but i think they're using a hacked shell on top of WinPE.
I have not seen the product, but the numbers that i hear are remenicent of WinPE.
So there is room enough for one to make for cultural differences interfering in performance.
All one has to do with OSS, is hand-comb the source if it is a security issue: the source is there, and one can blend in acceptable bits.
Of course, security costs, and one have to have people doing this sort of stuff anyway for other things. If you're going to trust software to potentially billions of dollars of equipment, national security, and lives, i suppose it might be worth the effort.
My recollection was that was what the Russians did. A home-grown DOS that they had complete control and access to the code to. You don't need fancy guis for the systems: just a modular approach to the show.