Void's Forums

Posted: **Mon Jun 11, 2007 4:11 pm**

Ok, so maybe it's a little bit over the top. Or is it? :)

http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?stor ... 1082734557

Posted: **Mon Jun 11, 2007 4:17 pm**

The only blood dripping here is from the Club
Linux will never die, no matter what
Hopefully it'll do an Hit 'n Run with Wondoze

Posted: **Tue Jun 12, 2007 2:41 am**

I think the market will begin to equalize within the next 10 years. Many of the linux forums I go to, I am seeing more and more people saying the old, "I'm a linux newb" or "My first time trying something other than Windows". I'm sure it's part of a cycle, and Linux old timers (Like Void

) have seen it all before. Somehow though, this time seems like it has a lot more momentum behind it.

With Vista's failures and the let down to the general public it was (because it wasn't what MS told them it would be), it's empowered all of the other OS's to get there feet firmly on higher markets.

I don't see MS going away, but I do see a substantial growth in Linux.

Posted: **Fri Jun 15, 2007 3:43 pm**

that club doesn't look anything like a window! a better cartoon would be gang of masked guerrilla penguins throwing bricks through a set of microsoft windows and running away. i can't do electronic cartoons so i won't even try.

Posted: **Fri Jun 15, 2007 4:09 pm**

Didn't MS sometime/somewhere say that it should be(or even is?) illegal to do reverse engenering, but wth did they do when they created M$-DOS?

They showed a documentary here years ago(or a movie, can't remember) that showed that they employed people that had nothing to do with IBM or M$ and their work was to read disassembled code from IBM's DOS and that code was passed to another dude that also had no connection to either part and he/she read the code and created a new code... MS-DOS.

I say... POWER TO THE PEO... LINUX
lol

Posted: **Fri Jun 15, 2007 5:20 pm**

The way I recall it is they "bought" DOS for like $50k and made their initial fortune by selling it to IBM. I believe DOS has a lot of ties to CP/M. The most famous case of reverse engineering that I recall was the BIOS for the IBM PC, but that wasn't Microsoft. That's how the whole "IBM PC Compatible/Clone" market got going which made companies like Zenith, Tandy, Gateway, Dell, etc possible. I'm not sure anyone at Microsoft was actually smart enough to reverse engineer anything. They bought or stole 99% of what they sold, even to this day.

Posted: **Fri Jun 15, 2007 5:35 pm**

so the tv-show/movie I saw had to be a scifi then, 'cos it sure looked and sounded true, like a BBC Documentary show

Posted: **Fri Jun 15, 2007 5:40 pm**

DOS History:
http://inventors.about.com/library/weekly/aa033099.htm
http://www.fortunecity.com/marina/reach/435/dos.htm

Microsoft bought the rights to QDOS for $50,000, keeping the IBM deal a secret from Seattle Computer Products.

IBM PC Reverse Engineering BIOS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_PC_compatible
http://www.computerworld.com/softwareto ... 32,00.html

A famous example of reverse-engineering involves San Jose-based Phoenix Technologies Ltd., which in the mid-1980s wanted to produce a BIOS for PCs that would be compatible with the IBM PC's proprietary BIOS. (A BIOS is a program stored in firmware that's run when a PC starts up; see Technology QuickStudy, June 25.)

To protect against charges of having simply (and illegally) copied IBM's BIOS, Phoenix reverse-engineered it using what's called a "clean room," or "Chinese wall," approach. First, a team of engineers studied the IBM BIOSâ€”about 8KB of codeâ€”and described everything it did as completely as possible without using or referencing any actual code. Then Phoenix brought in a second team of programmers who had no prior knowledge of the IBM BIOS and had never seen its code. Working only from the first team's functional specifications, the second team wrote a new BIOS that operated as specified.

The resulting Phoenix BIOS was different from the IBM code, but for all intents and purposes, it operated identically. Using the clean-room approach, even if some sections of code did happen to be identical, there was no copyright infringement. Phoenix began selling its BIOS to companies that then used it to create the first IBM-compatible PCs.

Posted: **Fri Jun 15, 2007 6:26 pm**

hmm...

So Microsoft IS!! the best software company in the world??
They don't really steal... they create it from the beginning
lmao

================================
PS...The Joke...
Answer:

Mrs Gates said it on the wedding night...
micro... soft....

lmao
================================

Posted: **Fri Jun 15, 2007 6:39 pm**

Basher52 wrote:So Microsoft IS!! the best software company in the world??
They don't really steal... they create it from the beginning

No, in this case they "bought" it and sold it, not created it.

Posted: **Fri Jun 15, 2007 7:12 pm**

what I said was supposed to be a joke

sorry
we all know what they are capable of...nothin'

Posted: **Mon Jun 18, 2007 10:23 am**

was the documentary one of the PBS "Triumph of the Nerds" episodes by "Robert X Cringeley"? He sets out quite a good history of early PC development in these shows actually.

Basically DOS was bought by Microsoft and then slightly altered and licenced to IBM as an operating environment for their newest computer, a personal computer, designed for mass production, for what was designed to be, and turned out to be, an enormous profit. The alterations have never been proven or admitted to have been stolen or reverse engineered from the CP/M operating environment however Gary Kildall, the originator of CP/M, has always maintained that this is what happened, and he has produced various evidence in an attempt to show that this was the case.

Void's Forums

Clubbing baby penguins

Clubbing baby penguins