Quasi-OT: How to double your CPU power. for free

Yes, my employer does the same. They don't pay for another license for the OS, though. The new image also includes the standard software (Office, and whatever), and all the security and settings that IT/legal thinks are necessary.

obviously there is, it's just applied to PCs if you don't get windows as well. Who seriously thinks new windows is free?

If you buy a PC priced with windows bundled you may be buying from the wrong place.

NT

When you think of the amount of wasted CPU this has been causing all around the world, it makes folding@home, SETI@home etc. pale into insignificance, and probably rivals the global non-ASIC bitcoin mining capacity. I figure that every patch tuesday Microsoft owes me at least one bitcoin, and probably also a cure for cancer and a chat with some aliens.

A while ago I proposed that any new multi-core CPU should have one sacrificial core just reserved for windows update. That core should consume the minimum possible amount of power, whilst achieving absolutely nothing just as effectively as a normal CPU core running windows update.

Chris

I could get Office for like 15 euros administration fee, if I wanted to. Microsoft offer "home users" working at companies where they have sold Office licenses a cheap license. But I don't have a system with Windows so I did not care to get that.

15 euros is still a lot more than I pay for a full Linux OS including the libreoffice suite, but lots of people would equate it to "for free".

The amount paid to Microsoft for including Windows with your PC is tiny when compared to the advertised sales price for a boxed set. The additional (negative) amounts for trial software bring that back to zero.

Maybe you missed the bogus 'compatibility error fiasco.'

Windows ran beautifully under OS/2 as a virtual machine, giving OS/2 users all the benefits of multitasking OS/2, and superb backwards compatibility with everyone's heavy investment in Windows-applications.

So, M$ wrote an encrypted piece of self-modifying code that only unraveled itself briefly, in real-time, checked to see if Windows was running as a virtual machine under OS/2, gave an ominous 'compatibility' warning message, then erased itself.

THAT warning message scared everyone off, even me. The last thing anyone wanted was a flaky compatibility problem. We were all tired of crashes in those days of DOS-extenders, extended/expanded memory managers, TSR-programs, etc.

There was no actual compatibility problem at all.

BYTE magazine hunted M$'s dirty deed down with a logic analyzer, disassembled the code, and showed that it did nothing other than check for OS/2 & print this bogus warning (IIRC, but I'm pretty sure). But that was months later, and the various corporate IT people were already well-frightened.

The damage was done--they never got over it.

It sure the heck is their fault. They don't get to break something then demand *I* R(their)FM. That's b.s. Besides, it's literally their fault--they intentionally broke it.

Cheers, James Arthur

You make a good set of points.

Some time ago I estimated Microsoft had wasted more man-hours of human creativity than some of the world's most infamous dictators.

I really do blame Bill Gates for setting this new low standard in software, making *that* the standard, and convincing the world that that's okay.

Cheers, James Arthur

So your company has paid for it - it is not free (or even cheap).

There are a variety of ways to get Office for lower than off-the-shelf prices, sometimes significantly cheaper. There are also a variety of ways to pay more. (Someone at Microsoft once tried to persuade me to buy licences for the department in packs of 5 rather than singly. Over a three year period, the multi-pack would have cost twice as much as 5 single licences.)

Office is MS's main "cash cow". It takes a fraction of the development effort, compared to Windows, but rakes in huge profits. MS tries to make sure that every computer has Windows even if they have to give it away, because that is the basis that you need in order to buy their software. Then they make their money /selling/ you MS Office (and other software for business use).

I haven't had any version of MS Office on a computer at home or at work since Word for Windows 2.0 on Win3.1. I use LibreOffice on both Linux and Windows.

Dodge Vs Ford. Not only does Microsoft not care, Microsoft can't care.

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This email has not been checked by half-arsed antivirus software

Well... it depends on your view, of course. The company has to buy enough licenses for every employee at work and sure they have to pay for that, but once they have done that their employees can get "free" licenses for use at home. You can view that as the double number of licenses each costing half of what a volume Office license costs, but there is no option of buying half the number of licences and add the free ones for use at work.

That is very true. It does not end at Office, because when businesses want to use the Outlook mail/calendar program they need to buy the Exchange server, and to use that they need SQL server, and it goes on.

But it is a commercial company making their money from those licenses. What is sometimes frustrating for us users is that they spend this money on themselves (and supposedly "charity"), instead of on product development that benefits the user.

I'd forgotten about this incident where Microsloths FUD'd DR-DOS. It sounds an awfully lot like the OS/2 incident I'm remembering--I may have conflated the two deeds (but I don't think so--I paid real money for OS/2 2.0, then never installed it over this concern, IIRC).

"The AARD code was a segment of code in a beta release of Microsoft Windows 3.1 that would determine whether Windows was running on MS-DOS or PC DOS, rather than a competing workalike such as DR-DOS, and would result in a cryptic error message in the latter case. This XOR-encrypted, self-modifying, and deliberately obfuscated machine code used a variety of undocumented DOS structures and functions to perform its work, and appeared in the installer, WIN.COM and several other executables in the OS."

That Wiki article quotes a pair of smoking-gun memos, one from Gates. The reply, from Silverman (senior VP), read: "What the [user] is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS."

It was smart in an evil sort of way. If OS/2 had taken off (or DR-DOS, for that matter), Microsoft and its evil army of ethically-challenged code-monkeys wouldn't exist. IBM would still be a titan. And software would be expected to actually work.

Cheers, James Arthur

UPDATE: Setting Windows Updates to "Don't update and don't check for updates" prevents the defective Windows Update process from loading, which fixes the CPU-hogging problem.

Cheers, James Arthur

Actally IBM had an alternative to Windows called Presentation Manager. Maybe if they worked on that a bit more they could have given Gates a run for his money. The problem might be printer drivers and such.

There was also a DOS shell called Desqview that I think had a bunch of the features of Win 95, but many years earlier. It did eat RAM though which was ridiculously expensive back then.

Presentation Manager was part of early OS/2. By version 2.0, OS/2 was a full-on, stable multi-tasking operating system of the sort that Microsoft kept teasing, but never delivering.

Cheers, James Arthur

The problem with OS/2 was that it was too early, and it was therefore targeting the 80286 protected mode. 286 systems still were expensive, and OS/2 required "a lot of memory" (in those day's terms). It was not very realistic to use OS/2 on all desktops in a company.

When 386 systems appeared, of course you no longer would want to run a 286 (16-bit) OS on your shiny new 32-bit box. About the only OS that quickly became available for the 386 was XENIX, but it was expensive. OS/2 took 5 years to adapt to the new 386 world.

Thankfully, Linux came out shortly thereafter. It finally made the PC a capable system with a usable OS. It would still take several more years before Windows finally was a 32-bit protected mode OS on the desktop.

Nonsense. OS/2 2.0 came out in April 1992, as a shiny, fully 32-bit protected mode OS with preemptive multitasking and a very nice thread model. I wrote a lot of multithreaded OS/2 code back in the day.

The 16-bit subsystem was actually pretty useful--it allowed one to get hardware access by using a 16-bit DLL with I/O privileges (ring 2). I ran a lot of instruments over a bidirectional parallel port that way.

Microsoft knifed OS/2, pure and simple--they procrastinated on their deliverables while promoting Windows 3.1 very heavily.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

Yes, but the first 386 desktop machines appeared in 1986, more than

5 years before that. That is *ages* in computer history. We had to wait FIVE YEARS, more than the technical lifespan of the systems, before OS/2 became available for the 386.

In the interim, all those 386 systems had to run in 286 mode or only in niche applications like a Novell fileserver or XENIX system.

Protected mode was useful, but it took much too long to develop OSes that used it in those days. For a long time, the new features of the processors were only used to emulate memory bankswitching hardware for the real mode.

I waited until 1992 before I bought a PC-compatible 486 system for use at home. The release of Linux was the trigger for that. I surely did not want to spend so much money on an advanced machine that would only be used in emulation mode for the old hardware.

Linux made the system really shine.

And a variant of that programme offers an absolutely brilliant way of spear phishing very senior PHBs with limited technical knowledge.

2003 was the last truly good version of MS Office it has been downhill all the way since then with "the Ribbon" and other bogus "productivity" aids. 2007 as launched and out of the box was horrifically unstable.

It is basically money for old rope as far as MS is concerned. Better to have someone using their software with a paid for MS license than a dodgy cloned copy with added malware being sold at car boot sales.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown

It will also take you off the air when some critical update against a hostile zero day exploit fails to get applied because you are too arrogant or stupid to keep your OS up to date against vulnerabilities.

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Regards, 
Martin Brown