"Windows 9" "Threshold" and "Windows" Rumors thread

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

4NT has been doing this for as long as 4NT has been released. The current version is called TCC LE and is FREE!

So does mintty and a bunch of other command prompts that are not installed as part of the OS build.

Name me the unix-based terminal that doesn't do that, bundled or not...

(I use mintty with cygwin. Also did this for years. )

Now if only they would make some useful functionality available via the command-line, so I don't have to install cygwin in order to copy files around.
Bonus points for tab-completion.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by Anthem

Windows 8 will be the Windows Vista of Windows 7 to Windows 9 (perhaps!). Vista was a solid platform that got a far worse rap than it really deserved, but Windows 7 came along, tweaked a few things, made a few platform changes, and Boom! people love it. We may see something similar with the 8-Threshold transition.

Sounds about right. Vista got slammed for two basic reasons. One was getting released before the hardware needed to run it well was fully in the pipeline, and many systems sold with Vista didn't have the horsepower it required.

The second was a change in the underlying permissions model. Windows through XP followed the same permissions model inherited from MS-DOS - the user at the keyboard is the administrator with all powers to do everything. Since most exploits require admin rights to do their dirty work, this became increasingly untenable as time passed. Vista made the default user a power user, able to run existing programs but not modify the state of the underlying system, and required assuming administrator rights to do a variety of things users were used to just doing.

Personally, I thought what MS did with Vista should have been done in WinNT, when the NTFS filesystem was introduced that made it possible. You couldn't do it under FAT because the file system had no place to store the permissions information. NTFS did, and supported the notion that there was more than one kind of user on a system with differences in what they were allowed to do.

Win7 kept the new permissions model, but smoothed a lot of the rough edges and made dealing with it far easier. WinXP can be thought of as what Win2K should have been, and Win7 as what Vista should have been. Win9 looks like it will follow the pattern and address the issues raised by Win8.

We can now get a head start on speculating about what transcendent horrors Win10 will unleash on the world, and what Win11 will have to re-mediate...
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Dennis

[fjtorres]

Originally Posted by Glorfindel

That's odd.
I wonder why they did that huh::

Certain numbers are culturally sensitive in some regions.
For example, in Japan, nine is considered unlucky:
http://blog.lingualift.com/lucky-unlucky-numbers-japan/

Microsoft itself has experience with unlucky numbers. Like with Four, as in MD-DOS 4.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Win9 looks like it will follow the pattern and address the issues raised by Win8.

We can now get a head start on speculating about what transcendent horrors Win10 will unleash on the world, and what Win11 will have to re-mediate...
______
Dennis

Yeah, you realize you are out of date by like several hours, right?

Tch, tch.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

4NT has been doing this for as long as 4NT has been released. The current version is called TCC LE and is FREE!

I ran 4DOS in the MS-DOS days (and was moderator of the online forum for it on one of the BBS networks of the time.) 4NT was the 32 bit console version of 4DOS, with Take Command as the GUI equivalent. TCC-LE follows in the footsteps of 4NT.

I have it here, but it's not the only thing I use, with Win32 ports of bash, tcsh, and zsh also available. I was running an open source tabbed console manager called Console, but have largely switched to ConEmu, which is actively maintained and continuously updated. I can run any of the various command interpreters in a tab, and have all active simultaneously.

Those who just want to add some power to CMD.EXE should look at Clink, which uses a Win32 port of the Gnu readline library to add bash-style command editing and completion.

For those who like the command line and want a subset of Unix/Linux command line utilities, I like Gow, which offers many of the Gnu/Linux commands in native Win32 ports, avoiding the overhead of things like Cygwin or AT&T's UWIN which use a Posix emulation layer.
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Now if only they would make some useful functionality available via the command-line, so I don't have to install cygwin in order to copy files around.
Bonus points for tab-completion.

See my references in another post in this thread to Clink and Gow.

(I used to run Cygwin, and don't now. For that matter, I ran UWIN at one point. In the MS-DOS days, I ran the MKS Toolkit, which sold me with a complete DOS implementation of the Korn shell.)
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Dennis

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Yeah, you realize you are out of date by like several hours, right?

Tch, tch.

I was in Virginia visiting friends for the better part of a week, and had other things to occupy my attention. (And the netbook I took with me isn't well suited for things like this.) I just got back home about an hour or so.

Feel free to s/win11/Win12/ and then s/Win10/Win11/ above.
______
Dennis

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

See my references in another post in this thread to Clink and Gow.

(I used to run Cygwin, and don't now. For that matter, I ran UWIN at one point. In the MS-DOS days, I ran the MKS Toolkit, which sold me with a complete DOS implementation of the Korn shell.)
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Dennis

Yes, there are all sorts of third-party tools to make cmd.exe useful.

It would be nice, though, if MS could maybe do that natively, so you don't have to install a bunch of stuff just to get basic usability. At this point, it is almost not worth including the command prompt itself, after all, I can just install it with the other stuff.

All of those are nice options, though. Thanks for the suggestions.

Currently, I will stick with cygwin as it doesn't require admin rights to install (school computer), and does both jobs in one. And it's familiar.

[eschwartz]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I was in Virginia visiting friends for the better part of a week, and had other things to occupy my attention. (And the netbook I took with me isn't well suited for things like this.) I just got back home about an hour or so.

Feel free to s/win11/Win12/ and then s/Win10/Win11/ above.
______
Dennis

I did.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by eschwartz

Yes, there are all sorts of third-party tools to make cmd.exe useful.

It would be nice, though, if MS could maybe do that natively, so you don't have to install a bunch of stuff just to get basic usability. At this point, it is almost not worth including the command prompt itself, after all, I can just install it with the other stuff.

Back in the day, I ran 4DOS to replace COMMAND.COM under MS-DOS (when I wasn't running the MKS Toolkit's version of the Korn shell.) MS talked to 4DOS vendor JP Software about licensing it for inclusion in MS-DOS, but JP principals Tom Rawson and Rex Conn didn't like the deal offered and declined. The MS rep threatened that MS would enhance COMMAND.COM instead and kill 4DOS's market, but it never happened. This came as no surprise to Tom, Rex, or any other 4DOS users. (The Norton Utilities did license a version of 4DOS for inclusion with their package, that they called NDOS.)

I was installing third-party software to add things that arguably should have been in DOS to begin with since the DOS 2.X days, and I didn't expect that necessity to go away. I was not disappointed in my assumption.

All of those are nice options, though. Thanks for the suggestions.

You're welcome.

Currently, I will stick with cygwin as it doesn't require admin rights to install (school computer), and does both jobs in one. And it's familiar.

If it's what you are familiar with, stick with it. I dropped it as overkill for my needs when things like what I pointed to became available. Cygwin ports the Gnu development toolchain to Win32, and assumes you will be doing development in a POSIX environment using GCC. I'm not, and just wanted a *nix shell and set of command line utilities I was used to under *nix. Cygwin was far more than I required, and required fiddling to deal with the differences between the DOS/Windows and *nix PATH separator and option delimiter chars.

Native Win32 versions of various things relieved that problem.

(The MKS Toolkit under DOS included a SWITCH utility to let you change the MS-DOS option delimiter char from / to -. Do so, and you could use / or \ in PATH statements. (One version of DOS let you do that in CONFIG.SYS.) When MS-DOS 5 came out, there was concern among Toolkit users, because DOS 5 removed the system call that let you change the option delimiter, but kept the one that queried what is was. (Don't ask me...) As it turned out, the Toolkit still worked as expected under DOS 5. If it hadn't, I would have stayed put at 3.3. )
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Dennis

[j.p.s]

Originally Posted by alanHd

Next windows to be called windows10. Wonder what happened to 9

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-29431412

Originally Posted by Glorfindel

That's odd.
I wonder why they did that huh::

The last umpty-ump even versions have been worse than the preceding odd version. They must have wanted two worse versions in a row.

I knew vista was in big trouble when it was reported that microsoft was having fierce internal debates over whether users should be allowed to silence the startup sound.

[DMcCunney]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

I knew vista was in big trouble when it was reported that microsoft was having fierce internal debates over whether users should be allowed to silence the startup sound.

That was the least of it.

Part of the problem was timing. Vista required fairly powerful hardware to run as desired. But the hardware required was essentially that which the next generation of PCs would have. The current generation in many cases wasn't really up to it. Among other things, some machines Vista was offered on would not pass MS's own Windows certification tests.

But MS wanted to End-of-Life WinXP and get a new revenue stream from a new version of Windows. So they created a new level below the old Windows Certified which OEMs bundling Vista could slap on the packaging of such systems. Former MS SVP Steve Allchin, who ran the Windows development efforts, was very unhappy with this. He felt the customer would have a poor experience, and MS would get yet another black eye in the marketplace, and was dead right on both counts. Steve Ballmer's response was that he had nothing to do with the decision.

And as it was, MS couldn't end-of-life XP because of a generation of things like netbooks that couldn't run Vista. (I have one running XP Home and dual-booting Lubuntu. No way it would run Vista...)

Had MS been willing to delay Vista's release till the general run of machines being sold was powerful enough, a fair number of issues could have been avoided.
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Dennis

[eschwartz]

And the drivers. Don't forget the drivers!

[JSWolf]

Originally Posted by j.p.s

The last umpty-ump even versions have been worse than the preceding odd version. They must have wanted two worse versions in a row.

Sorry, but Windows 98 was better then Windows 95.

[wodin]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Sorry, but Windows 98 was better then Windows 95.

Then there was "Bob"