[geeks] Carly Fiorina to enter politics? This nation is doomed...

[Jonathan C. Patschke]

On Tue, 14 Sep 2004, Charles Shannon Hendrix wrote:

>> No, they didn't.
>
> I think we have different definitions of "integrated".
>
> I don't mean integrated into the kernel.  I mean the OS as a whole was
> useless without the graphics subsystem.

Well, that's only because no one wrote a shell for native-mode NT.
There's no reason that NT 4.0 has to boot the GUI.  I've seen some
software that runs atop the NT executive directly.

> You couldn't run NT headless in any consumer release, unless I missed
> something big.

You -can-, but you have to hack around in the registry to tell it not to
start the GUI, and it's been years since I tried any of that.  Keep in
mind that the second-stage NT setup and the Windows 2000 recovery consol
are applications that run atop the executive directly without the GUI.

> I remember in one shop we had a few NT 3.51 servers, and we would very
> much have liked to run them headless, and have all the software run on a
> console or a glass tty.

Now, it may be that the Win32 subsystem depends on the GUI.  That would
preclude running any Win32 services headless.  You could theoretically
run an NT-native service on top of the service manager without the GUI,
but I'm not entire sure that the service manager isn't a Win32 program.

> Yep, and what was funny is they said that it was the only way to make a
> PC run graphics fast.

Well, -theoretically-, it should speed stuff up, except that a much
saner way of going there would be to map() video memory into virtual
memory, and give the video driver an exclusive lock over that region.

> Just look at the tools, nearly all Windows utilities, and just about
> every server program written: they all require various parts of the
> graphics subsystems.

Absolutely.  That REALLY irritates me, because the mechanics of NT do
not dictate that.  NT can run without a head, just like OS/2 could run
without PM.

-- 
Jonathan Patschke )
Elgin, TX        (  "Ma'am, I can do anything.  I own a game store."
USA               )             --Gord ( http://www.actsofgord.com )