Xenix would have, it was originally another V7 fork just like BSD as I recall, and it evolved following the SysV line -- quite parallel to BSD. The last time I used it it was pretty much SVR3, no BSD in sight.

OpenServer and UnixWare, on the other hand ... those are pure SVR4 and SVR4 owed a hell of a lot to BSD.

That's true, but in the push to get UNIX into the commercial space the SysV interfaces were released as an open specification. This was actually covered during the trial.

The fact of the matter was that the Linux folk didn't copy code, something that would have been obvious to any observer following it's development. The idea that there were vast amounts of stolen code was ludicrous if you knew anything at all about the internal structure of the two operating systems.

There was always the possibility of code that got injected during the large commercial code donations by e.g. IBM or SGI, and in fact the only piece of code that showed actual derivation came from SGI ... But it turned out to be both a very small amount of code and buggy to boot. As soon as people got a look at it they excised it in favor of working, original, code.

I personally expected it to go more the way of the AT&T veresus BSD case, where it turned out that AT&T had stolen tons of code from BSD, not the other way around. The Linux emulation layer in SCO UNIX seemed a particularly likely candidate. Either that turned out not to be the case or IBM simply didn't push the issue (perhaps because SCO was having so much trouble proving anything in their claims) though.

SCO's strategy always seemed to me to be a shakedown, scare companies into license agreements. Why they went after one of the deepsest pockets first is beyond me, IBM was very likely to fight given their investment, but it was clear early on that management was not very competent.

You raise some good points, but your "can they read two books you bought for your e-book" is off base. Sure, if you only have one e-book reader; if you have one per person it becomes much more flexible. For the last few years that was an expensive proposition (although in my experience the things paid for themselves in a few months) but prices are falling fast (and have you priced bookshelves recently?)

My daughter has my old Kindle and my wife uses the Kindle reader on her phone. We can all share the same library, meaning for instance that my daughter and I can (and do) read the same book at the same time with only one purchase.

One of the big wins for us, though, is space: We have thousands of paper books already, way too many to put on shelves. The expansion slewed a lot with the influx of e-readers.

2.1GHz huh? That's not a 1998 processor. The fastest Intel processor available in 1998 -- late 1998 -- was a 450MHz Pentium II Xeon. Neither Vista nor Win7 will install on anything even close to that.

It wasn't until 2001 that Intel crossed the 2GHz line, and 2002 when there was a 2.1GHz processor in their lineup. That, I think, sets the tone for analyzing the rest of your system specs.

That 1998-era 50GB drive? Umm, no. Drives in 1998 time were generally in the single-digit gig range (much too small to even install Win7). Here is the announcement of a series of new machines from Dell that year:

http://news.cnet.com/Compaq%2C-Dell-ship-new-computers/2100-1001_3-212040.html

We'll get back to that announcement in a minute.

IBM released a 10G drive in July 1998:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/15-years-of-hard-drive-history,1368-2.html

So that pretty much sets the upper limit of what would have been available. 50G drives were around in 2002-3, which is probably not coincidentally the same time frame as your 2.1GHz processor.

Now, the G1 mentioned in the article above was a pretty good Dell system in 1998, the kind of thing you bought to run NT4. Its maximum RAM? 256M, one quarter of what you say you installed.

I'm too lazy to go figure out at what point it was possible to buy a Dell desktop system that was expandable to 1G, but I am willing to bet it's somewhere around 2002, just like all of the other specs of your system.

So I would have to conclude that you actually installed Win7 on a 2002 or 2003 era machine, and it will run very poorly with only 1G RAM; my personal experiments showed that the systems' responsiveness was downright awful below 2G (32-bit).

Cheers!

I think you misunderstand, I was talking about moving to a completely different machine. It's drop-dead simple to do.

It's true that an iMac or mini are not very upgradeable internally, but that's more the form factor than anything else, and you can substitute newer bigger drives internally if you like. I have generally hung FireWire drives off them instead, but YMMV.

I've personally done at least twelve full version upgrades of MacOS, including one TiBook that had full version upgrades five times. I had one problem across all of them: That TiBook had a nine-letter password set back when it was new with 10.1, and became impossible to log into when upgraded to Leopard (10.5) because it had only one account. There was an upgrade bug where passwords of more than 8 characters that had been set with 10.1 would not carry through.

It took me about 45 minutes to work out how to fix that (the obvious approach using the boot disk got me an admin account, but I still had to reset the password on the old one, and that was mildly annoying). That is around seven hours less time than the minimum I have ever spent on a Windows upgrade, and considerably less time than I had to spend trying to figure out how to get Vista Home to talk to my NAS boxen (MS changed the minimum security requirements for network shares in Vista Home for some inexplicable reason).

I am more than a little dubious about the claim of a 1998-era PC running W7. That would likely max out at 512M unless it was exotic for the time (meaning server-class hardware), and W7 wouldn't install on something that small, and the CPU and graphics would not be anywhere near W7 minimums either. I got complaints installing it on what were pretty well configured 2005-era machines and they ran poorly even doing basic things until I put at least 2.5G RAM in them.

In contrast I had a 1998 era G3 clamshell Mac running Tiger (the last version that would install from a CD), and I had Leopard running on a 2001 TiBook and 12" G4 Powerbook. The funny thing to me as I advanced from 10.1 to 10.2 to 10.3 to 10.4 and finally 10.5 was that each upgrade actually ran better on the same hardwar than its predecessor *despite* having greater capabilities.

I have to compare that to Windows. XPSP2 doubled RAM requirements and Vista quadrupled XPSP2. Win7 didn't get much worse than Vista, but it is of course not much more than a service pack to Vista. I've never seen a version of Windows that ran better on the same hardware than the one before since WinNT 3.1->3.5.

Snow Leopard makes a big break in that they dropped support for non-Intel, which means that machines I bought expecting 6-year lifespans are only going to get 5 before I hand them off to someone else. In the world of Windows PCs I'm lucky to get much more than 2 years before I roll the machine down into the Linux server farm and get something that runs the latest Windows reasonably well.

YMMV, but in terms of longevity Apple has done very, very well in my experience. And in terms of ease of migration to new hardware, which is what I was talking about previously, they are second to none.

At my day job we're still developing on XP, I think mostly because that's what the customers mostly use. But we want to move to W7 because it's difficult to do development on machines limited to 3.2G ... and more and more customers are using it.

Regarding the pain of upgrading, I thought that until I got a Mac. Migration to new hardware, upgrades, and disaster recovery are all really easy. You wouldn't believe how pissed I was at Microsoft the first time I migrated to a new machine. Plug the old one into the new one, push a button, and 20 minutes later the new one had the complete environment of the old one - data, apps, settings, even drivers. It takes me days to get a new Windows box up and running.

Personally I want people on W7 because it is vastly more secure than XP. Maybe I will have to spend less time fixing the damn things.

I can't find a manual can opener anymore that lasts more than a few months. They're all made in china, and they all break very quickly.

You aren't even trying:

http://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=oxo+openers&tag=googhydr-20&index=garden&hvadid=2961762689&ref=pd_sl_34nkn4xzkc_b

(I don't know where those are made, but they're well built.)

Oh please. This is Windows, where someone thought it was a great idea to put up annoying bubbles telling you that you have unused icons on your desktop, while simultaneously remaining completely quiet about the drive that is erroring away towards certain death.

In my personal experience, that is.

Frankly I think the only reliable restore point is a back-up image.

So you agree, obviously. I mean, who the hell would pay for MP/E or HP-UX?

Seeing as I was standing in front of my house I didn't have a dying need to know where I was; rather, I was curious as to why the iTouch even had a "find me" button in the first place.

It had one because it works, at least some of the time. Frankly it spooked me as I was absolutely certain that there was no GPS capability in a first-gen iTouch. So how did it know?

It took me a couple of hours to work out how it did it, after which it was pretty easy to find the service Apple uses via Google.

I think it's kind of funny how little Apple advertises this capability, but it certainly does work and inside of densely populated areas it often works better than GPS.

"My iPad has no 3G, therefore it has no GPS. But applications were constantly asking me for permission to use my location. This seems like an oversight: if you don't have a location sensor, don't ask! Even the built-in Map app asked me for information that it could not possibly have."

At first blush this seems like a reasonable comment, but it actually isn't. Depending on where you are, your WiFi-only iPad may well be able to find itself using the Skyhook service that Apple uses, which uses a database of WiFi base station IDs and their coordinates. I was shocked the first time I pushed the "where am I" button on my iTouch ... and it found me to within a few feet.

I put it to you that there is a significant delay between new malware showing up in the wild and the antivirus people even noticing, much less getting a signature update out there. Days, certainly; possibly weeks. The malware guys certainly seem to react to new signatures with new variants in a matter of hours. It's almost as if they run the standard packages and as soon as they pick up a new hit they generate a new variant. (That's what I'd do.)

But even if this impression is wrong, and detection and updates are nigh-instantaneous, you're suggesting that the standard antivirus packages do not update themselves often enough by default to close the window enough to be effective ... which just goes back to my theory that these packages are approximately zero percent effective.

I know these scanners used to work, back in the day, but I haven't seen one inkling to suggest that these packages are at all effective these days given how easy it is for the malware authors to distribute new software whenever they feel the need.

We're not going to solve this with scanning utilities, it's a waste of resources. We need to approach it with cryptographic signature and trust lists starting in the BIOS and going all the way up to user applications. We need to stop the use of privileged accounts for day-to-day work, and treat applications as hostile. Applications that touch the net should especially be treated as hostile and run with especially reduced privilege sets.

Some of this is going to be difficult to do in the near term, but at the very least the operating system ought to verify its own intactness; it's ridiculous how easy it is to replace a few modules and subvert the system at the lowest levels on the next reboot.

The costs of trusting software have long ago gone beyond reasonable, it's time to start building the infrastructure to ensure that it's possible to detect illicit modification, particularly of system code, and to make it at least remotely possible to identify the source of malware -- and therefore culpability -- by denying unsigned code from running at all, and only allowing signed code to execute if it is signed by someone with which we have a trust relationship.

If this sounds like a closed system ala the iPhone, that's right -- the iPhone does it right, technically. But there's no need for this system to be under the control of a single vendor as with the iPhone. The existing certificate system already does that; you can decide who you want to trust. What is no longer tenable is not having any kind of trust system at all beyond sheer guesswork. Too many people don't know what to trust, and just say "ok" to everything. It is no surprise that this leads to 12 million strong botnets, is it?

If I had a nickel for every computer I had to clean malware off that was already running a major brand-name antivirus package....

Seriously, the antivirus packages are so full of holes it isn't funny; as far as I can tell these packages are nearly zero percent effective against modern threats. Virtually every unsophisticated Windows user I have ever seen has a PC loaded with malware despite antivirus. It's just too easy to work around the signature-based detection systems, or to trick users into doing something stupid ("Your system has a virus! Click here to fix"), and the malware authors are very good at getting around the prophylactics. The packages that actually do work well -- like Malwarebytes and Spybot -- are not in broad use, and of course they complain a lot about even legitimate operations.

The only way I have found to solve this is to get these people off of Windows entirely. I had hoped that Vista would help, but as far as I can tell the new protections did next to nothing to stop the malware authors, perhaps because so many people go and turn off UAC entirely. The jury is still out on Win7.

You're right in that there were some software systems built that could more or less reverse the fuzzing (down to ~150 feet, anyway), but the advent of differential GPS pretty much eliminated the usefulness of Selective Availability. Between that and the obvious commercial benefits of accurate GPS it was a pretty obvious decision.

These days there are other alternatives. I mentioned E911 but there is also Skyhook's positioning based on WiFi location (used by the iPhone, which is why it has superb accuracy in cities).