Are you sure that Win9x wasn't a more popular DOS extender? ;-p

(Definitely was for me - before I could afford a decent computer, I used a manually stripped-down version of Win95 SR2 that weighed in at around 15 megabytes in order to get decent multitasking, and disk caching that performed better (and was more stable) than either SmartDrive or HyperDisk.)

This wasn't really because of the framebuffer address itself, as much as it was the general PC memory layout, combined with a lot of programs abusing internal system structures expected to be at hardcoded addresses. (A000:0000 sure is placed at the 640kb boundary, but it's only 64kb in length; the text-mode buffers framebuffers were at B000 and B800 for monochrome and color, respecitvely).

Most programs used DOS or BIOS calls to allocate memory, so if it hadn't been for the somewhat FUBAR memory layout, and a whole bunch of programs depending on accessing OS internals (which we had to do because CPUs were so goddarn slow back then, that the cost of doing an INT 16h or INT 21h (or ...) for some operations was prohibitively high), there would have a bit been less config.sys tweaking to try to squeeze just a bit more real-mode memory out of the system.

But framebuffer address in and by itself impacting memory allocation? Not really, not until the "32bit physical address" limitation introduced with WinXP-SP1, because of sucky 3rd-party driver developers ignoring PHYSICAL_ADDRESS.HighPart, with a mindset along the lines of "we're on a 32-bit OS, how could a memory-mapped address ever be larger than 32bit?" (even if MMIO to hardware isn't the same as access to physical memory, and PAE was available since the PPro in 1995, but I digress).

No, at least not exactly that - "memory-mapped files" implies that you application treats file access as a pointer to memory, and that the CPU+OS handles all the dirty details (implemented on x86 through the #pagefault mechanism) - before "protected mode" was introduced on the x86, this wasn't possible, and applications had to manually implement paging strategies.

Does anybody else here remember the joys of 16-bit x86 development and .ovl files? :-)

Considering how many users KS have, there might still be a few mails in the outgoing queue?

I received the "uh oh, we've been hacked" mail yesterday 22.30, GMT+1.

Can't please everyone.

And hey, it's easier to get all riled up in your parent's basement than it is to get involved and give proper feedback.

Can't really think of a time where I had to "delete the next N lines" - but "expanding selection to next enclosing scope" or "word boundary", and either deleting or copying or cutting that? Or moving the current line, or currently selected lines up and down? That happens a lot... and my IDEs have shortcuts for that.

And then there's the neat stuff that's hard to do in a non-IDE, like efficient navigation (including jumping to one of multiple possible concrete implementations of an interface).

Sure, vim is neat for editing dumb config files over a SSH connection, but I don't get why people don't want to use the best tools for the job when it comes to programming... simple manipulation of text is probably what I spend the least amount of time on while doing development stuff.

Hack mainframes and exfiltrate police data, as well as hack back mainframes and attempt to grab get hold of other people's money, and you will very likely be charges.

Of course Warg aka anakata claims he had nothing to do with it, that it's traced back to him because he had an "open lab computer", but that's the oldest excuse in the book... and with the kind of boasting anakata used to do online, well, I think there's a pretty good chance he did play an active part. If it was because the USAnians wanted to get hold of him, Sweden is really already their little bitch and would gladly roll over.

PHP has actual rules of grammar? I thought it was one big kludge :)

Windows 8 might be a LSD trip - but how on earth would you see that as a bad thing? ;)

On a more serious note, I ended up with Win8 on my work laptop, since nobody at the workplace could point me a a working win7 image - I don't really see any of the FORmetRo crap on a day-to-day basis, so it mostly just feels like a win7 that's slightly faster and smoother. YMMV.

EFS? :)

Not that I use it myself (much prefer TrueCrypt), but it sure is convenient and drop-dead transparent.

I don't believe they should - and I hope I'm not giving off that impression. But I'm trying to deal with the actual facts of this whole miserable situation - which is bad enough without resorting to FUD. Better to stick with the facts, so we can cry (even more) foul if Microsoft violates their own guidelines...

Also, I don't find the idea of a "secure boot" in itself to be such a terribly bad idea... but the way it's being dropped upon us, with ARM being locked out from the beginning, and the level of uncertainty for the x86 future? Not good.

For Windows 8 certification, on x86 hardware, the user must have the option of disabling Secure Boot. See the official requiements (Windows 8 System Requirements PDF), page 121. A couple of select quotes:

Obviously, this is the requirements for Windows 8, and there's no guarantee Microsoft won't remove that for the next iteration - and it's only for x86, whereas ARM must be locked down. We should definitely be wary & weary, but let's still stick to the facts, right?

Start by asking the why/what-basis questions, politely, without explicitly declining their request. While waiting for reply, check out which lawyers are available in your area. Depending on Piriform's reply to your inquiry, go and talk to one of those lawyers - even if you're in .eu where IANALs believe you're allowed to do the importing based on laws around interoperability.