That’s not a matter of “secrecy”, just that the resources needed to publicize and distribute a public beta wouldn’t be well-spent by repeating the process for each week’s new build. The folks who will actually test such things will be hooked into Connect, and from there, it should be easy to find and pull the new beta builds.

The other option is to what MS already did with IE8b2 over IE8b1; deliver the new build as an automatic update.

Firefox is nice because it’s self-contained and small, so patching just becomes a matter of replacing the whole thing. However, this nearly always breaks extensions, leading to prompts to “look for new versions” that could be used to keep malware current and ahead of av detection. Personally, I hate plugins and extensions, so I’m happy to slough them off :-)

IEb2’s still a bit wobbly, and in ways that are different to IEb1 (i.e. some old bugs fixed, some new bug patterns added) – so we definitely need some more builds before RC or RTM status.

My hotmail had some problems as well but Microsoft helped me quickly with those. Even my Gmail account recently had issues. I am still determined to have Microsoft release the consumer 9x source code to me, you Chris Quirke, MVP or DOD or NSA of the U.S. Government because if Microsoft is unwilling to invest the money to develop and use the consumer 9x source code then we and my clients are indeed willing and able. I want this 9x source code for our schools across the world to be able to use older educational software as well as for consumers like myself who have old DOS games that they want to play on a modern computer. The government thing is a third and lesser purpose but it may be needed to force a play to Microsoft to sell, surrender or develop another 9x consumer product once they realize the demand and need and that I am not going to go away.

Heck, I had lots of fun beta testing Vista but just for security since that is the area that I am fairly good at. Please feel free to email me about this if you want further details about this tri-source code, my ideas and the development so far. I do not currently blog and the one blog I started I lost long ago. Heck, I lost my job at APS in October due to inappropriate email from dew1975@hotmail.com but I was not even the one who sent the emails. I hope you did not get any weird emails and there was something with Matrix737 when I recovered my email account and started deleting fraudulent contacts, then realized that fraudulent emails with my employee information had been sent to Ken Cole, the Director of Technology at Albuquerque Public Schools but life goes on and I hope to get a job at my former employer Target and hopefully lie low for a while.

I will continue to use email and post here but I am no longer posting at tsl-game.com which was hacked this year by someone and had 9-11 propaganda put up on the website and will now limit my postings on the windows 98 general newsgroup as well as other microsoft newsgroups. It is unfortunate but this is the way things have to be in this day and age. Take Care, Chris and I am glad you are doing well. In my opinion, Vista is secure but XP is better with backwards compatibility but you can give my Windows 98 Second Edition any day over those 2 operating systems. LOL!!

I wondered why you did not just open a Terminal under GUI but get out of the GUI environment? It is like opening a command prompt under Windows.

Cheers

Normally one thinks of dual-booting two OSs so that you run one or the other, but you can also host one OS within another, as if it were an application within the host OS.

That’s what Virtual PC and similar things do; to whatever is run within them, it appears as if they have a computer system’s hardware all to themselves. The actual hardware can be quite different, and that’s OK as the virtualized OS never smells the real hardware.

So what you’d do, is create a virtual machine within Linux or modern Windows, complete with a virtual hard drive (that is really just a file within the host OS). Then you’d either boot a BING CDR within this virtual machine and restore a Win98 installation’s image to the virtual hard drive, or you’d boot a Win98 diskette with DOS CD drivers and install Win98 to the virtual hard drive that way.

These virtual PCs really do function like real separate PCs. If you want the hosted OS to “see” the rest of the host file system, you have to do that by exposing network shares – and that network access will fail if you unplug the physical LAN cable (even if only because the virtual PC no longer gets an IP address via DHCP). When you boot the virtual PC, you see BIOS POST, and you can boot MemTest86 and it will run without mishap.

It’s only one step further to emulate the processor, i.e. run non-native code such as that written for the ZX Spectrum, or Apple Mac. Certainly, today’s PCs are fast enough to emulate Win98’s processor if they had to, but currently this is not required; virtual machines combine the efficiency of native processor code with the compatibility of completely hidden hardware.

Microsoft’s Virtual PC 2007 hosts Win9x very well, and the virtual hardware is Win9x-friendly (Sound Blaster sound card, Intel 440BX chipset motherboard, S3 Trio64 SVGA card). I don’t know what virtual hardware is used within Linux-hosted virtual machines, but I do know such machines are available.

I want to be able to give our schools a chance to run all of their old dos programs and windows 3.1 programs like Space that will not run on XP or Vista. I want our public schools to not have to throw these old programs away. In addition, I want consumers like me and others who have old dos games to be able to run them on modern operating systems. My final goal is to have a secure tri-source code with Windows 9x technology guarding the interior defense, Windows NT Technology guarding the exterior defense and open source code such as Linux, Mozilla, and Google technologies interwoven throughout this operating system to make a super secure operating system for the U.S. Government. Hopefully, it will be able to help Africa too with Africom if the politicians don’t mess it up. Thanks for your feedback and I appreciate being able to use your blog to share my ideas. Have a nice week. As you can see these are 3 seperate projects with varying levels of completeness and none being able to get too far without the 9x consumer source code.

If you’re buying OS source code, it’s presumably for long-term objectives – and as such, it’s best to consider Win9x as an OS without native hardware (e.g. as a wrapper to harness apps written for it, running within a hosted VM).

The newest motherboards break just about every hardware compatibility point possible, with respect to Win9x:
– PCI Express graphics
– hard drives always > 137G
– 512M+ RAM (Win9x OK but needs “settings”)
– S-ATA that even XP no longer sees natively, e.g. ICH9
– no PS/S, only USB for keyboards/mouse

In effect, XP is emerging as the “skinny fast OS” for the future, as 3-year depreciation cycles see “old” XP systems being offloaded. This will be particularly common for SDRAM-based PCs, where RAM is costly to add, and where many XP systems would be stuck with 128M-256M (i.e. too low for Vista)

Other native OSs that may suit, include Starter variants of current MS OSs, stripped-down embedded versions of the same, and the various Linux distros.

WinME’s core code would give you generic USB storage support, which is good to have – and if you had the source (and the right to alter it, which is not a given) it would be interesting to see how cleanly the alternate boot to DOS mode could be returned to the OS :-)

If you do adopt a VM approach to “shelling” Win9x on arbitrary modern hardware, you may not need the source code, depending on what role the host OS can play in protecting the Win9x-and-apps’ “edges”. Some sort of license deal to allow widespread deployment might be enough?