My understanding is that NT had quite a bit of OS/2 in it.

It doesn't. They are completely different architecturally. NT was a 32-bit, multiuser, heavily multithreaded, built-for-SMP, portable, mostly-microkernel OS.

OS/2 was... Not.

Seeing that MS had rights to OS/2 and wanted a new OS in a hurry following the breakdown of their partnership with IBM, it would be suprising if they had not used parts of OS/2.

In a hurry ? It was five years between the start of NT's development ('88) and its first release ('93).

If I wanted ritual in my life, I would have become a priest and pursued my career with extreme political ambition so I could vote for the freaking pope.

I guess you've never read an article in your life about mobilizing the voters who are too lazy (or metabolically downtrodden from their Cheetos and Coke diets) to physically show up at a polling station?

Paper is a physical token. Reliably obtaining exactly one unambiguous, untamperable physical token with confidentiality from each adult member of society—the vast majority of which are collected on the same day—hasn't exactly proven to be an easy problem, especially when broadened to include public trust—that every voter understands and believes the process to have all of these properties (to at least a substantial degree).

Electronic voting vastly reduces the complexity on the collection side, but then the tamperability problem looms supreme, but this could almost be solved with enough crypto cleverness, except that the public trust story then requires a tiny bit of numeracy beyond grade six math.

Ritual, however, is accessible to a four-year old.

The same four-year olds who are unfortunately not yet equipped with fully functioning batshit detectors.

I don't want to abolish ritual. I simply want to reduce it to the size where I can drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub.

It's actually why they codified it. They found it was a technique effectove teachers taught, and how people do it in their head.

I personally think it gets too much focus, it doesn't work for everyone, and different tricks work for different people, but I assume most people that struggle woth getting it are not "math people". I also don't think teaching math people techniques to everyone is necessarily going to work.

This is sad. Why not cite the original Brian Aldiss short story, instead of Spielberg's abomination that had very little to do with the original content? In the movie, the super-toy was just a minor sub-plot.

Seriously, the 8088/80286 and their addressing space limitations set back the DOS-based world by years, until Intel finally accepted that people wanted to use individual chunks of memory larger than 64K, and that they wanted to run their old real-mode DOS programs, too.

Intel wasn't the problem. The 386 was released in 1985.

Win 3.0 was absolutely awful. It crashed and needed a reboot about twice an hour.

Rubbish.

It was soon replaced with the improved 3.1.

It was two years between Windows 3.0 and 3.1.

One major reason for the split was that IBM insisted on programming OS/2 in assembler - over Gates' objections - locking them onto the 386 platform.
At least that is the way I remember it.

I think you are remembering IBM's insistence that OS/2 ran on their shiny new "AT", with it's 286 processor when the 386 was already out on the market.

It was already working on the next version of OS/2, but split from IBM's path and re-branded the new product as Windows NT. IBM then started their own separate development path and produced OS/2 2.0.

Minor correction. Microsoft - Dave Cutler's team - were working on the OS that was going to replace OS/2 (OS/2 "New Technology") that was then turned into Windows NT 3.1 and successors after the (surprising) Windows 3.0 success.

IBM took the "old" OS/2 code (that both they and Microsoft had worked on) and tarted it up into OS/2 2.x and successors.

Windows NT and OS/2 have no common ancestor. They are completely different OSes from bottom to top.

That explains why in the mid '80s to mid 90's IBM was busy in a joint venture with Microsoft first and alone afterwards... to produce a PC system with networking, multi-tasking and file permissions and even 32 bits (OS/2).

OS/2 (at least in that timeframe) was not multiuser. Neither was it 32-bit (IBM insisted it run on their brand-spanking new AT with its 16-bit 286 CPU).

And the Microsoft/IBM "divorce" was around 1990.

With that said I don't agree with GP. I don't think IBM had that much strategy.

My mom is unfortunately on my phone plan because she can't manage her own finances well enough to pay for a phone herself.

Last November she lost her closest-thing-to-a-dumb-phone-I-could-get-her. It would still do web stuff, but... in a very dumb way, like "smart" phones before the modern (iPhone/Android/etc) smart phone era did. I simply could not get her a phone that only make phone calls, but that was close enough for those purposes.

And then she lost it, and I had to replace it. I wanted the cheapest goddamn dumbest simplest most basic phone possible. All she wants or needs to do is make phone calls. She doesn't give a flying fuck about texting or internet or anything! (Or she didn't at the time, and I wish it had stayed that way). All. She. Needs. Is. A Phone. But to get her a "dumb" (not even, like before) phone would have actually cost me more than their cheapest generation-or-two-old smart phone, a Galaxy Mini S3. Now she's fucking addicted to it and sucking up all the data (that I barely even use) on my plan.

What the fucking fuck has happened where it is simply impossible to get just basic phone service without paying more for it!?!?

That could happen if you both enjoy Piña Coladas and getting caught in the rain.

This is an important concept. Corruption of temporary / high performance scratch data can have terrible consequences, when the loss may not be that big of a deal.

I'm shocked at how people have trouble grasping that.

I've never used any of the three languages in discussion here, and would barely count myself as a programmer at all, and upon initial reading of each of these routines this was my interpretation:

Java (I assume yours is): For every integer (call it "i") in the set "items", if "i" is less than ten, do whatever the 'add' function of the 'results' object does to it. (No idea what that function is, but my first guess would be to do the math of "results" + "i". Upon reflection after seeing the other languages' versions of this routine, I get now that it means "put 'i' as a member into the set 'results', or more loosely, "add 'i' to the set 'results'".)

Haskell: The set "items" contains members 1, 15, 27, 3, and 54. The set "results" contains every member of that set ("items") that passes the filter of being less than 10. (This is the clearest to me, and the one that shed light on the purpose of the other two).

Python: The set "items" contains members 1, 15, 27, 3, and 54. The set "results"... uhh.... assuming this does the same thing as the Haskell function, I'd guess it means that "results" contains every "item", where "item" is any item in the set of items, but only if "item" is less than ten; a roundabout way of saying, in a more Java-like fashion, "for every item (call it 'item') in the set 'items', if 'item' is less than ten [then that is part of what the set 'results' equals]".

Except it's not hyperbole because I actually mean all.