I Am Bismark

windows, please die.

i work with the vista drivers and i have to use a thinkpad w/ xp at work. it is torture. yesterday i spent the morning trying to get rid of this stupid virus that was infecting the MBR of all my flash drives and test hard drives. i ended up having to use my macbook to clean them off correctly (apparently the windows built-in formatter doesn’t wipe the MBR and apparently it no longer comes with fdisk either.. go figure). soooo obnoxious.

this was posted today on slashdot:

Windows is ‘collapsing,’ Gartner analysts warn

it seems like a happy thought to me, but i doubt it will happen anytime soon. the most interesting reader comment though was here:

There never was a Windows OS!

“Windows NT was developed by Dave Cuttler (of DEC VMS team) based on a operating system specification developed by IBM. (It was supposed to be released under the name OS/2 version 3).

Microsoft implemented the Windowing API on top of that operating system.

The fact is that Microsoft has never developed a commercial operating system from scratch!!!

They have only incremented the original Windows NT (a.k.a. OS/2 v3.0) code base, for example by:

  • replacing the OS/2 file system delivered in Windows NT with the more modern NTFS
  • re-writing the OS/2 deveice driver layer of Windows NT with a new, 32-bit and C-based API [the original NT device driver model was 16-bit and assembler-based]
  • moving the implementation of the graphics API into the ring-0 kernel [big mistake!]
  • replacing the OS/2 multitaskin DOS compatibility (i.e. the text window of Windows) with a less DOS-compatible one, which was supposed to run on multiple processor architectures.

The effort to create a new operating system core for Vista failed because of lack of in-house knowlege.

The task of writing a new core OS (under the Windows API) seems to be too difficult for a company run by marketing people and lawyers.”

its all so clear now. have fun with vista, windows lovers.

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