There were a few things (GDI handles and suchlike) that had very small limits. Once you exhausted them, the system was basically unusable. There was a little program you could run that would show the number allocated vs allowed. By the time you'd launched one program, they were normally 60-90% gone.

These two are related. OS/2 needed 16MB of RAM to be useable back when I had a 386 that couldn't take more than 5MB (1MB soldered onto the board, 4x1MB matched SIMMs). Windows NT had the same problem - NT4 needed 32MB as an absolute minimum when Windows 95 could happily run in 16 and unhappily run in 8 (and allegedly run in 4MB, but I tried that once and it really wasn't a good idea). The advantage that Windows NT had was that it used pretty much the same APIs as Windows 95 (except DirectX, until later), so the kinds of users who were willing to pay the extra costs could still run the same programs as the ones that weren't.

I never ran 3.0 on a 386 to try that. On Windows 3.1 it wouldn't work, because the OS required either (286) protected mode or (386) enhanced mode. Running 3.0 on a 386, the DOS prompt would use VM86 mode (yes, x86 has had virtualisation support for a long time, but only for 16-bit programs). Windows 3.0 could run in real mode, so would work inside VM86 mode. In real mode, it didn't have access to VM86 mode (no nested virtualisation), so probably couldn't start again.

I'm not sure if it ever became a real product, but the Novell guys did have Netware running as a paravirtualised Xen guest. Apparently it was quite an interesting challenge, as Netware was one of the few operating systems to use rings 1 and 2 on i386.

And Windows 3.1 lost real mode support. You could run Windows 3.0 on an 8086 with an EGA screen and 640KB of RAM (I did - the machine originally shipped with GEM). I think 3.1 still have 286 protected mode support, but didn't work very well unless you ran it in 386 enhanced mode. It was a bit sad that the version of Windows that required an MMU didn't use it to implement memory protection...

Sort of. The desire not to cannibalise sales was a key factor in the design of the PC, but these were also features that IBM didn't think would be missed.

IBM knew what multitasking was for: it was to allow multiple users to use the same computer with administrator-controled priorities. Protected memory was for the same things. Why would you need these on a computer that was intended for a single user to use? A single user can obviously only run one program at a time (they only have one set of eyes and hands) and you can save a lot in hardware (and software) if you remove the ability to do more. And, of course, then no one will start buying the cheap PCs and hooking them up to a load of terminals rather than buying a minicomputer or mainframe.

My father's company got their first Windows 3.0 install because they bought a diagram tool (Meta Design, I think), that came with a free copy. The company that made it had decided that bundling a copy of Windows 3.0 was cheaper than writing (or licensing) a graphical toolkit for DOS and an associated set of printer drivers. I don't know if they were the only company to do this, but after a year or so they stopped bundling Windows and just expected their customers to either have a copy already or go and buy one.

Some of us are lucky enough to have parents who made a conscious decision to have children, worked out what it would cost them, understood that it was a responsibility and a commitment, and decided that the costs were worth it. Some people have parents who fucked and forgot the pill (or whatever) and decided that keeping the child was the path of least resistance. For those of us in the first category, one day a year per parent is nowhere near enough - we owe our parents a lot for the advantages that we had early on that let us succeed later in life. For people at the opposite extreme, even one day can seem like an insult.

You don't need to do any of that to qualify as a mother, you just need to make it to childbirth. If you're in the first category that I described, then please do remember to appreciate your parents, but please also remember that those advantages that you're thanking your parents for giving you (teaching you right from wrong, as you say, and hopefully teaching you to value education and how to be happy) are not universal.

Remember, occasionally, just how lucky you are. If you're born in an industrialised society, in a stable family, with supportive parents, then that gives you a huge advantage in life.

I had exactly that experience! Though mine was on Linux and was one of the things that pushed me to *BSD. An unstable text-based format that varies between architectures and between kernel versions turns out to be a piss-poor way of getting information from the kernel.

I can't speak for other universities, but we (Cambridge) publish undergraduate admissions statistics (though the 2013 figures are the latest published so far, I think 2014 is out soon). If you look on pages 13 and 14, you'll see the gender ratios for applications and acceptances. 8 subjects have more female applicants than male, 7 have more women accepted than men. 18 have more men apply than women, 19 accept more men than women. In total, 54.4% of the applicants and 53.1% of acceptances are men. I'd hardly call that underrepresentation. You are right that the figures look slightly different if you exclude STEM. For Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences, 43.8% of applicants and 42.6% of acceptances are men. White men and women make up 74.7% of our applicants and 75.6% of our intake. It's pretty hard to argue that white people are under-represented here.

If you look at other top-10 universities in the world, you will see a fairly similar picture. A big part of our admission training is getting interviewers to understand their subconscious biases (usually this means 'people like me', although the aspects of 'like me' that they think are important are quite varied). There's no affirmative action or direct equivalent (the closest thing is a set of targets for state school applicants, which we usually meet).

The idea of reverse discrimination is to correct for unconscious biases. The end result is intended to be the result that you'd get if you had a really unbiased person making the judgement (which doesn't exist in the real world).

I wonder how improvements in logistics and remotely operated weapons systems change the need for this. The danger of having everyone on a base be incapacitated by illness while surrounded by a hostile enemy was huge 50 years ago and would easily outweigh possible dangers from side effects of a less-tested vaccine. Now, it's far easier to have drone patrols protecting a quarantined base and deliver men and equipment from reserves far away to fill the gaps in an overall strategy.

It's hard to translate miles into actual value. 30K United miles + fees buys you a transatlantic flight. When I was looking a couple of weeks ago, it was the same going from LHR to EWR or SFO, with $188 for the UK leg and about $6 in the other direction (UK airport taxes are pretty huge). The round trip to SFO is about $1200 without the miles, so 60K miles works out to about $1K on that. That makes the value of 250K miles about $4000. This is a pretty low bug bounty.

On the other hand, the value depends a lot on whether they count as premiere qualifying miles and flight miles or not. If they count as PQM then the 250K is enough to give you the highest level of premiere status, which means you're at the head of the queue for upgrades and get a number of other benefits. If they count as flight miles (exceedingly unlikely!) then it's a quarter of the way to the million mile thing, which gives you star alliance gold for life (and, having flown far too much recently, I can attest to the fact that gold status makes it far less annoying. Apparently it actually become enjoyable at higher levels, but I'm hoping not to fly enough to find out).

I'm not sure about the 'Left', but the Democratic party in the USA tends to have more support among people with the technical ability to rig elections if they were held online. The Republican party tends to have the support of the people who own the companies that can rig them if they're not. With this in mind, it doesn't seem surprising that neither party is in favour of paper ballots.

Because one of the strengths of email is that it is a decentralised, multi-vendor platform. The fact that you use gmail doesn't prevent me from using hotmail, yahoo, or whatever, or rolling my own. And that works fine, until one or two players has a dominant position. See what Google has done with their XMPP support, for example. When they were the underdog, they were happy to federate with everyone in a vendor-neutral network. Now they're increasingly trying to lock users into using their network (I think federating is up at the moment, but you can't add new contacts on non-Google-hosted domains).

The other aspect is privacy. If a certain percentage of my social graph uses gmail, then it doesn't matter that I don't - Google can still get a fairly accurate view of the shape of that graph, which is valuable to them. The other poster claimed that it's a reaction to whatever is popular, and he's right in a sense: email is a more robust network when there are no particularly popular providers and when people are fairly evenly spread between a smaller number.