Posts by Mage

It's Pablo Pic-arsehole: Turner Prize wannabe hits rock bottom

Artists or poseurs?

Turner is pointless.

Some artists are just egocentric attention whores. I know real artists.

British bloke bailed after 'hacker plunders Pippa Middleton's iCloud'

Evil bloke

But why do people trust ANYTHING private to anyone's so called "cloud"

Microsoft releases Server 2016, complete with commercial Docker engine

Re: Relevant

Is an MS Server relevant at all since 2003, unless you want Exchange and Sharepoint etc?

I installed plenty 1994 to 2004. After that only flavours of Linux. (In 1980s it was Cromix, VAX etc)

You can get more expert support at same price if you are not expert enough yourself for RedHat/CentOS or Debian etc.

What ever about the arguments about the Desktop, aren't we 10 years past EOL for Windows Servers unless you are determined to inflict Exchange and Sharepoint on people (There are better free Mail Servers and CMS, though Calendar/Scheduling is separate, as it should be, Outlook / Exchange concept [of combined mail & schedule] is evil and designed to lock people into MS

Silicon Valley’s top exorcist rushed off his feet as Demons infest California

Sherlock Holmes

Apparently they are keen to prove there is a "natural" cause and most people, the over whelming proportion, contacting them are either ill, disturbed or seeking attention. So there must be a lot of Silicon Valley CEOs and Managers being turned away.

Why attribute to Satan what is just ordinary egotism and typical bad behaviour?

Brexit at the next junction: Verity's guide to key post-vote skills

Wonderful

And far more believable than May or Corbyn.

I'd bet a tanner she's right.

Brain plague or estate agents? I know which I'd prefer in Virtual Reality

Or Anvil

Anvil (C) 1998 by Nicolas van Pallandt

Several books before 1980 by John Brunner

Also Robert Sheckley

some here:

http://vr.isdale.com/WhatIsVR/frames/WhatIsVR4.1-Fiction.html

I think there are stories from mid 1950s & early 1960s before ST-TOS

Google rushes in where Akamai fears to tread, shields Krebs after world's-worst DDoS

Re: Plastic bag charge

People do pay for their connection already.

People often do have a traffic cap, even if hidden in "fair use".

Why should everyone pay for idiots that don't setup their router/firewall properly for their IoT?

We could perhaps fine makers $500 per vulnerable device.

Broadband is already expensive enough without everyone subsidising IoT. The proposal would not help as it's the aggregated data of thousands or even millions of PCs, IoT, tablets, phones and even routers/modems etc.

Dev teaches bot to talk spammers' ears off

XKCD

https://xkcd.com/810/

a little less relevant

https://xkcd.com/233/

https://xkcd.com/632/

https://xkcd.com/1646/

The Great British domain name rip-off: Overcharged .uk customers help pay for cheaper .vodka

.uk expensive rip off?

You should see the price the Irish "non-profit" organisation charges for a .ie domain, I don't know of any more expensive ordinary country domains for a local business.

feayiyo.co.uk Available €7.95

feayiyo.uk Available €7.95

feayiyo.ie Available €19.95

There are "cheaper", even "free" but usually introductory or part of a hosting package

Dutch bicycle company pretends to be television company

Re: TV already is a drug

Yeah, Karl Marx wrote that?

'Everyone' is buying Twitter

Re: useful services such as Uber, Lyft, or AirBnB

They do NOT provide the service!

They are exploiting the real investors in property and vehicles and exploiting the actual workers by having them as self employed contractors.

They are just specialist advertisers, and Uber is also slurping all the user data (no doubt why Google has invested).

Re: Sigh, It was inevitable I guess.

It's pointless though unless you are a Celebrity or someone that wants to follow the vacuous tweets.

Facebook is pointless too, but has been more successful? Or have they as it emerges they pumped up the video view time by a huge amount by not counting all the short views!

$18bn?

So it's got less users to take the personal details of than Whatsapp? ($19bn)

The userbase is the only value of these parasite companies. Same with Uber and AirBnB.

Maybe it would be cheaper to pay <state actor of choice> to hack the database, like Yahoo. I bet Verizon is cross that Yahoo kept it secret. They can only be buying Yahoo for the user details.

Lean in and pivot: Even Steve Jobs didn't work alone, startup boy

Money, Personality and Marketing

I discovered later that the tech or other product/service is just something for those to purvey.

Also like novels (Harry Potter) or pop groups maybe a lot of luck. Talent doesn't result in a success with music or writing.

It's true it's 90% perspiration and 10% inspiration, or something like it.

Some get money by successful lying to investors or grant agencies. (Recently T******* and in 1980s D********). Personality!

Also Steve Jobs and many other US startups in a Garage ... Not a UK type garage, but rich families and luxurious workshop man cave garages. Also many exploited other people shamelessly and lied. It was almost never about the Tech. Far better stuff than the Apple I / II at the time. I fell for hype and bought an Apple II when an S100 based CP/M machine would have been better for my 1980 startup.

Days are numbered for the Czech Republic

Re: Obviously...

That's too similar to that place just north of Greece.

(Are they and the Greeks talking to each other yet?).

In other European Geography, British or Britain was hijacked by Queen Liz I of England, and really referred to all "These Islands" (as the GFA calls them) as well as part of France now called Brittany. Before UK or even England existed.

Fascinating stuff, Geography, and my pre-1918 maps of Europe are now more accurate than all later ones done between 1918 and 1991!

Also amazing that Dalriada is making a comeback in "Ulster", but not yet in Scotland and "Glenshane" is to become a region. Maybe UK/England/Scotland should give the re-invented Dalriada the Stone of Scone, which if real, is the Lia Faíl, (Stone of destiny or Shadows), though given that it's Scottish sandstone, someone must have made a copy before the English first took it, but after it was lent to the Scottish from Ireland. Though there may be a 1950s copy too. The pillar in Tara is nothing to do with the Stone of Destiny.

What about Boho-Morav as a contraction of Bohemia-Moravia? Maybe not.

Will we see an independent Catalan / Catalonia too soon?

British unis mull offshore EU campuses in post-Brexit vote panic

Re:entire villages of empty properties?

Not near anywhere with a college, IT, University or town. The idea was to persuade people to commute for over an hour each way.

Some were no use even for that, simply developers gone mad.

We are short of housing where people want it, hence any help to first time buyers etc simply puts the price up an equivalent amount.

Like the UK, government has been selling off so called "social housing" and building little or none in comparison.

People that can travel from home each day to Uni are seriously envied. Some rents per person sharing for students are more per week than my monthly mortgage. An inferior version of my semi on less land is x3 more inside M50 ring. Or nearly as much on the desirable side of Corrib in Galway City. So I can't afford to move either!

Oi, Apple fanbois. Your beloved Jesus Phones are pisspoor for disabled users

Apple unsuited?

Why buy an iPhone at all? Apart from a better touch interface than almost all others in the first year, they have always been overpriced, poor performance, hyped and at least since iPhone 4 or 5 no advantage over the cheaper, better performance competition.

I use a Sony Ericsson Xperia Z1 bought S/H for €50. Had it for ages now.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Xperia_Z1

It has a real phone jack, micro USB, micro SDHC (32G card plugged in), Micro HDMI, nice FM radio and good enough camera.

I have for comparison a 32G iPhone 5 I was given, much inferior. I used it a few days and went back to the far better Z1

The new iPhone 7 sounds dreadful for nearly £600! No earphone socket, no SD card slot, worse battery life than iPhone 6 (which was already poor).

Loads of far cheaper far better phones out there.

The "eco system" argument is bogus. A Mac user can use any brand of phone and MacOS != iOS and also any OS Laptop can use an iPhone (I was surprised I can connect iPhone 5 to Linux and browse / read/write all the files, no iTunes installed, I doubt that works on Windows or Mac).

Pull the plug! PowerPoint may kill my conference audience

Re: A quick thought

Trivial.

Also the pause / play button is then your friend.

Though not all projectors/TVs support all resolutions or codecs.

Some printers will even print a presentation converted jpeg via the panel USB host socket (Which someone I know thought was for PC and he actually managed to get an adaptor, I told him the PC connects at the back)

Re: hmmm.... or a broach.

a cask of real ale?

Why do you want to make a hat (or maybe a brooch, perhaps you are from NI or parts of Scotland)

Forgive me, father, for I have used an ad-blocker on news websites...

No I don't

a) I'm not going to buy anything as a result of an ad on a news site. Usually I buy by browsing a shop, eBay, Amazon etc or searching for something I've decided I want. I never click, so no revenue lost?

b) Phone / Tablet is tiny real Estate, so added Firefox and an adblocker. On Windows and Linux ads are only blocked as a side effect of NoScript, which sadly doesn't seem to be on Android?

c) Ads are often a 3rd party site and can be a source of privacy breaking trackers or malware. On Firefox on Android, Windows and Linux I block 3rd party cookies. Why isn't that the default? Third party cookies break intent of cookie law. Why does no site popping up Cookie Warning have no optout, they all add them anyway, on Windows / Linux I usually block main site cookies too except if I have a log in on the site.

d) Unlike Broadcast or Bill boards it's my bandwidth!

e) I'm wondering if on Radio, adverts should only be between programs, as unlike TV, you can't mute them.

People need to find better ways of making money, besides it mostly feeds Google?

ARM emits Cortex-R52

Can't drive a car

Things like cars should have separate semi-automous CPUS for dedicated functions. ARM cpus start at about 50c for a 32 bit alternative to a PIC, 8051 or Atmel microcontroller. Possible subsystems more reliable if each has its own SoC CPU with built in I/O:

* Reversing alarm subsystem

* Engine management

* Heating control

* ABS

* Security / locks / immobiliser

* Dash display management and real time clock

* Fault monitoring, maybe lamps, air bag, seatbelts, seat position?

* Secure Diagnostic Interface

* Entertainment system control

* Voice control

Things like navigation with decent display would be a CPU more like in a tablet.

An autonomous control system would interface to the above systems and extra sub controllers to control things normally done by human.

'Faceless' Liberty Global has 'sucked the very soul' out of Virgin Media

Ha ha

The Virgin Media that didn't much care about customers?

Well, the staff are always unhappy about a take-over, because any new owner will want to change how things are done.

Liberty's take over in Ireland of Chorus and NTL Ireland by their UPC (name of their Dutch Cable subsidiary) resulted in a huge investment and improved service for customers. I'm baffled they are renting the Virgin brand in UK and rebranding the Irish UPC as Virgin and even suggesting it's a "take over" of UPC by Virgin which is nonsense as Virgin is only a brand and there is no change of ownership at all in Ireland.

Half! a! billion! Yahoo! email! accounts! raided! by! 'state! hackers!'

Re: don't ever require a phone number?

I think they do if creating a new account on a tablet. They send SMS message key for next step!

Not enough personality: Google Now becomes Google Not Anymore

Oh when

When are governments going to wake up and protect their citizens? After all if you are a more invasive regime you should be upset about the usurper moving in.

My God, I've got nothing on! Microsoft's $200m Wunderlist is down

Re: Spain & London with two phones.

Even email would do that. I've had email on my phone, without even using a web page, since 2002.

Or SMS!

Re: Just use Google Keep.

Madness to use anything Google that has a private alternative. I only use Google services I absolutely need where there is no alternative.

I can't decide if Facebook or Google are worse, though there is the choice to never use Facebook, unfortunately people one knows use it and post private info about one and one's conversations etc on it.

WTF ... makes mobile phone batteries explode?

Re: ever reaches the density of chemical fuels

Technically Primary cells are chemically fuelled and unless Zinc Air, the "oxidizer" aspect is built in.

There was experimentation of Butane rather than Hydrogen fuel cell for laptops, but then Lithium replaced NiCd. By volume, the NiMH is now about x5 capacity of NiCd and after 100 cycles, perhaps similar volumetric capacity to LiIon, but much heavier. Interestingly if you "turbo charge" NiMH to get them charged in a hour rather than 10 hours and get it wrong, they go on fire too! I know because I've done it developing a turbo charger (the CPU was 486 SoC, replacing the charge control function with an extra 16 pin PIC solved the reliability issue, the 486 SoC was still used for main GUI and Wireless network monitoring features).

Any fuel cell, in theory, can be higher density than a battery always, because it uses air and could vent the water and CO2 produced. I'm not sure that LiPoly and NiMH are not both higher volumetric capacity than current fuel cells. The cost though of "recharging" a laptop fuel canister from butane, I'd think would be higher than mains electricity and Lithium batteries. Maybe a use case in isolated places with no mains?

Charging

"Shearing advises users to stick to the chargers provided with their mobile phones to avoid generating current or voltage levels that are incompatible with the battery."

In theory most phones have a single cell, 3.7V to 4.2V and a USB charger is 5V -/+ whatever allowed spec. The phone electronics, a little SMPSU controlled by firmware, decides the charge rate. A 5V 200A PSU will STILL only charge at 500mA, 1A, 2A etc, whatever the phone was designed to do.

Only older non-USB connector chargers were other voltages and then you had to use the maker's charger.

Zombie Moore's Law shows hardware is eating software

Re: ASIC vs FPGA vs CPU Development

Continued ...

Verilog and VHDL are NOT programming languages, they are Hardware description languages that are then translated into an FPGA configuration file or an ASIC specification. The same source can produce either and optionally include a CPU design (even if the FPGA has no CPU core), which is then separately provided with microcode, firmware, programs etc. The ASIC version would have a real CPU core, if one was defined.

Re: ASIC vs FPGA vs CPU

FPGA is used for low volume or where per unit cost or power consumption is irrelevant. ASICs are almost always modelled as an FPGA first.

Your Verilog / VHDL can be run as a simulation with monitoring on a PC/Workstation before downloading to the actual FPGA. You describe FPGA, you are not having a software defined Hardware, but re-configurable hardware modules and look up tables to implement a hardware design. So of course it's massively parallel, it's not a CPU unless that's in your HW description/Design.

I've only used the Xilinx FPGAs and tools though, not Altera.

CPUs and FPGA/ASICs are complementary. Some things only need hardware, no CPU. Some things are more easily realised as programs on a CPU, hence CPU plus FPGA. A Port or shared RAM can be used, or hardware CPU core on FPGA, or FPGA defined to create a simple CPU (6502, Z80, PIC), or an SoC with CPU cores, an FPGA area and conventional SoC i/o GPU. This allows field upgrades, wereas the ASIC or conventional SoC can only have the CPU / GPU firmware/programs changed.

Virgin Media costs balloon by MEEELLIONS in wake of Brexit

focused more on consumer in Ireland

Which is totally bizarre.

Chorus and NTL (NTL was what Branson bought in UK and turned into Virgin and the original company lives on as Arqiva, running transmitters and sat links) were terrible. UPC only spent millions rebranding to UPC using their Dutch logo* AFTER fixing the Irish cable companies they bought. UPC developed a good reputation (compared to Sky for TV or Eir/Eircom for Broadband). Then they throw that away by rebranding as a UK company with a poor reputation that they don't even own the brand for?

Will they rebrand back to their native UPC brand in Ireland after Brexit?

Since successfully rebranding as UPC, Sky had to resell Eir broadband (probably at a loss to sell a bundle with Sky Satellite, which makes a huge profit), UPC also bought TV3 and UTV Ireland in Ireland, Sky bought UTV's Sport/talk station in UK so now also owns all the previously owned by UTV local Radio stations.

TV and Radio stations take overs should not be allowed by pay TV platform operators, especially FTA ones.

Pay TV channels should not be exclusive to a Pay Platform.

Content should not be exclusive to any Pay TV channel.

The Consumer is getting abused!

Comreg, Ofcom, BCI, Etc are all asleep. UK has shown unwillingness to regulate Sky or their crazy EPG charges, which result in Freesat being overpriced for EPG too.

[*Though UPC is owned by US Liberty and thus is no more Dutch than I am]

New Gnome emerges blinking into the sunlight

SOME malware will ALWAYS find a way to escape the sandbox?

A web browser ought to be like a sandbox, yet it's now the most common infection vector.

A host can be compromised via a program on a VM, it's hard, but not impossible.

The whole mentality of this GUI project is more suited to a phone or tablet, not a laptop or workstation where the main use is content creation and manipulation rather than content consumption and navigation.

I'll stick with Mate, it's why I'm not migrating to Win 10, but to Linux.

Ubuntu and Gnome need to realise that they are NOT going to out do MS and displace 82% Android on mobile devices. Their user base is content creation on laptops, workstations etc, yet they want to destroy that for a market that they have less chance in than MS, who in 15 years has gone from 20%+ to < 2% on Mobile gadgets!

Idiotic! Can't they see MS has alienated people with Win8 and Win10? Even Apple is iOSing MacOS, Why are they copying all the worst ideas of Apple and MS and Google?

A better alternate to Android (privacy, being able to disable evil in Kindle eReader and other Apps) would be nice. But it won't be Ubuntu/Gnome! I have Lollipop on a 7" tablet and most apps can't access external SD card or print or do SMB access on LAN, though some can. OTH why should Kindle App have access to creating user accounts, passwords and almost every other feature and be putting adverts in Notifications? (That can be turned off, but I can't disable permissions of any app)

Zuckerberg to spend $3bn+ to rid world of all disease by 2100 (Starting with Facebook, right?)

treat cells as computers and reprogram them

"Do it like Computer Antivirus" MS said.

Except that doesn't work even for computers and often "kills" vital system files.

This is just PR and the bulk of the money going to San Francisco lab. There will be too much Silicon Valley input and too much emphasis on developing gadgets rather than real medical research.

Another Theranos in the making?

Who will have oversight of the research?

Wi-Fi Alliance publishes LTE/WiFi coexistence test plan

Crazy

WiFi is bad enough without and extra COMMERCIAL exploitation.

Search "Hidden Transmitter Syndrome" to see why the idea of spectrum sharing doesn't work. WiFi already has this problem and greedy companies want to make it worse.

Is ALL spectrum above 400MHz to end up being used (badly) for Mobile? They don't even re-use their own licensed spectrum properly because base station building is based on maximising ROI for minimal investment rather than sensibly mandated coverage and capacity by regulators. More spectrum is cheaper than more base stactions

Search how cellular channel reuse works.

What says Internet of Things better than a Bluetooth-controlled smart candle?

bluetooth controlled smart phone that you can control from your smart

watch

Apple did one, except unlike the £30 Chinese smart watches, the Apple one is only a bluetooth remote. You can get a far cheaper than Apple Chinese "smart watch" that controls your phone AND is a standalone phone too!

Search eBay

Robot overlords? Pshaw! I ain't afraid of no AI – researchers

Where is the AI?

Spelling and Grammar checkers are not much better than late 1980s. Why can't I get an AI to proof read a computer stored text?

Actually compilers are at a similar level to 1990s at initial parsing, and better than MS Office or LibreOffice for SIMPLE STUPID PUNCTUATION! Except we have all these stupid Web server files using maybe 6 languages and only a text editor that can spot mis-matched pairs of symbols and almost no source text checking before you try accessing it via a web client, because so much of it is scripting. HTML, ColdFusion, SQL, Javascript run on client, etc all in one file, maybe with php too.

After 40 years of programming, courses on AI and studying it, it seems unrelated to Intelligence and more clever ways of making and accessing databases, plus a load of marketing.

We don't even have a sensible definition of biological intelligence.

Victoria Police warn of malware-laden USB sticks in letterboxes

Re: "Not trust unmarked"

Fake marketing promo?

Ha ha ha ha!

Very possible for a GENUINE marketing promo to be distributing malware laden USB sticks. Possibly even unmarked!

Will US border officials demand social network handles from visitors?

SM ducks and decoys

Obviously even if you are innocent:

1) You need a decoy account as well as the important ons, and why are you on SM anyway?

OR

2) You need to create a decoy account and post made up drivel occasionally if you have no SM accounts. (I've been doing this for years).

This ought to be illegal under some sort of international convention, along with much else done without a Court order due to believable cause.

I'd not carry the passwords for anything important while travelling. I only memorise two.

A-dough-be: Photoshop flinger pumps profits 50 per cent

Incentive to fall off a cliff

It's more incentive for developers to create alternates.

It's more incentive for users to switch.

MS is making this same short term mistake. Lots of people in the long term can't afford this rental (extortion) model. The original licences were over priced too.

This will explode eventually.

Hackers hijack Tesla Model S from afar, while the cars are moving

Fixing it is almost irrelevant.

I don't trust ANY maker to do software without bugs.

Any system with any wireless connectivity may from time to time be vulnerable. The vast bulk of managements and many programmers are not good enough.

If it's happened once, it will happen again.

Legend of Zelda cracked with 6502 assembly language glitch

Re: Things have moved on.

Well, C was invented as a sort of portable macro assembler to make it easy to port UNIX. It's still too dependant on macros. In that sense, C isn't a modern high level language in the sense that C++ is, though it suffered from imposed C compatibility.

Still, 40 years later we are getting vulnerabilities due to array bound violations (often strings) and bugs due to unexpected side effects of macro expansion. So often C++ programs use C style strings which are insecure.

ARM was inspired by 6502.

Latest F-35 bang seat* mods will stop them breaking pilots' necks, beams US

Re: Handling the G's

Actually smaller people and women particularly handle excess G better and less likely to black-out.

HP Inc's rinky-dink ink stink: Unofficial cartridges, official refills spurned by printer DRM

Re: why can't the ink and the printhead be different assemblies?

Many Brother and Epson do use separate print heads and ink-only cartridges, sometimes fixed in the body. Long life piezo heads, the HP and others use shorter life thermal heads that make gas bubbles from alcohol to force out the droplets.

Most A4 inkjets were cost reduced to uselessness over 15 years ago.

Re: if the same market exists for laser

Yes.

A set of Brother cartridges costs more than a new Colour Laser. The 3rd party cartridges seem to be just as good. It's not that old of a model, Duplex too, though only A4. A3 Plus would be nice. However even the Brother laser cartridges work out about 1/4 price per page of running inkjet. Unless you need "photo" quality, I think now that ink jet is too slow and expensive.

Italian scientists use fluorescent box to arouse sexually indifferent men

25 per cent of men over 40 report problems with their sexual desire.

Too much or too little compared with partner?

IPv4 apocalypse means we just can't measure the internet any more

I don't want to be measured!

1) Reputation-based security systems;

2) Address geolocation; and

3) Network troubleshooting.

Item1:

Reputation-based security systems; Basing that on URL, IP address (IP4 or IP6) is madness, doesn't really work. You need a handshake and private tokens + public key encryption.

Item2:

Address geolocation; Go piss off. That ought to be illegal. Besides it's notoriously unreliable.

Item 3:

Network troubleshooting: Whose Network? Makes no difference to your own and irrelevant to the public network or do you want to peer inside OTHER people's networks?

Sorry, none of these reasons are arguments against IP4 and NAT. There may be good reasons to go all IP6, but these three reasons don't apply.

I certainly don't want anyone to know how many things are on my LAN and what their addresses are. If all was IP6, for privacy and security, I'd still have a firewall / router and hide all my network.

There are only BAD reasons why a 3rd party would want me to have everything using public IP6.

Skype shuts down London office, hangs up on hundreds of devs

Re: Skype to be an app on my TV

I've always said a cheap laptop/tablet/phone plus a dumb TV and a long HDMI cable is better value than a "Smart TV". No TV maker will produce new codecs and apps. No matter who owned Skype or what apps are installed, apps on a TV other than simplest USB stick media browser are doomed. Even with the USB stick / HDD, eventually you'll have AV formats not supported by TV, but at least you'd be able to re-encode for it on a PC etc.

Re:I had just had enough of Libreoffice not working well.

Just change the default settings. Works better on Windows and Linux for me than MS Office. I use now the "native" file formats and only "save as" in an MS Format to send to MS Office users or publishers.

I've had LESS bugs with format of manuscripts for publishers.

Re: So, any suggestions for alternatives?

I tried Tencent's QQ, it wasn't bad on Windows and Android, but seems to be Chinese only on Linux. I figured how to turn off the adverts (unlike Skype, it's a simple user setting!). It also used much less resource and offers groups and Webcast mode.

I'd still be using it if I could figure how to set up English Linux version. I had to go back to Skype for Text & File transfer (with very occasional voice and extremely occasional video). QQ features and GUI on Windows is far better.

However I've abandoned Windows unless they bring out a Classic version with best aspects of NT3.5, NT4.0 and XP. Now Linux Mint + Mate Desktop + WINE + Redmond theme. More like NT Windows 1996-2003 than Windows 8 or Windows 10. Works well on Acer Netbook with 32G CF card instead of original flash as well as the 8G RAM tower workstation.

MS: Something new?

Perhaps Word & Excel 1.0 for Mac (Windows got ver 2.0 I think). Visio, PowerPoint, MS SQL, DOS all bought in. MS Basic for CP/M etc based on porting Dartmouth BASIC, a cut down ForTran. NT3.1 was first version of Win10 and seems to have been on the back of MS 1989 OS/2 which started as a joint project with IBM, mostly IBM stuff? GUI on original NT, copied of Win 3.0 shell for DOS, inspired by Xerox, though they may have used bits of OS/2 Presentation Manager as Win2 and Win286 were horrible compared to DR Gem.

Perhaps embedded Win CE? Though it was a sort of cut down NT with a static limit to processes etc.

But you can make similar accusations against Apple, Google, Oracle etc?