I was wonderin gwhy all the fuss, already 20 years ago there were nice
disassmblers that make nice graphical lists and block diagrams of
the code.
If I EVER wanted to know something about MS soft, I'd get one and
have a look.
You are just underscoring my point. Microsoft has more to gain from
your looking at their source code than you do.
The open source community has coped fairly well with:
1. About a dozen different implementations of SMB and NETBIOS.
2. FAT-whatever.
It is still struggling with
1. NTFS.
2. Constant "improvements" to MS Word and the impact they have on MS
Word files.
The NTFS battle is slowly being won, but when M$ comes out with
Longhorn, it will, I am sure, have a completely different filesystem
"database". I have confidence that the open source community will
unscramble what surely will be a deliberately and elaborately
obfuscated database format.
The battle against Word is not to be won on the software front.
Companies are going to have to grasp the fact that Bill Gates & Co.
own a piece of all the intellectual property stored in MS proprietary
format. They don't need the features that MS is forever adding, and
those features aren't there to make the product more useful, they are
there to make escape from the clutches of Microsoft ever more
difficult.
One thing was missing in that site whith the fun code:
while(1)
{
printf("close all open applications\n");
get_user_action();
pop_up_window("reboot now for the changes to take effect");
rst 0
// catch interrupt
printf("Windows has started in safe mode\n");
printf("Your configuration files are missing\n");
printf('Missing or defective FAT, want to try spare one?");
wait_user_input();
printf("No files found\n");
printf("Try re-installing, hope you had backups\n");
....
printf("Buy a completely new hard disk, install Linux, mount the
Windows disk as needed to transfer files to a safe environment.\n
Leave Windows disk in place, as the TrueType fonts are worth the cost
of the entire Windows OEM installation, but be sure to add the windows
fonts to your Linux font path.\nIf your Windows disk is in NTFS,
download and burn a copy of Knoppix and use it to transfer your
Windows files to your Linux disk.\nThank you for contributing to the
Bill Gates greatest philanthropist of all time fund, thank you for
using Windows-supplied discount TrueType fonts, and have a nice
day.\n");
RM