Plus, the mysterious disappearance of the Bill Gates as a Borg icon for Microsoft stories,,, (It just about managed to survive to the latest "not as good as the HTML 3 version"[1] relaunch with a crappy illustrated version, but that seems to have disappeared in place of a generic Microsoft logo on new stories...

Slashdot just isn't right anymore...

[1] If anyone does know how to use this newfangled Javascript based comment system, just don't bother telling me how to use it, like all sensible people I turned it off when it was first introduced years ago, and have no intention of learning how it works./p

The Nt prefix seem to indicate it's part of Windows' Native (kernel) API. It isn't that well documented. Safari is probably going via the public Win32 API, which calls the Native API when kernel services are needed. It's a bit (kinda, sorta) like on Linux where a user programme won't usually directly call the kernel, but libc will call it when needed.

After a bit bit of playing "let's intentionally crash Windows", it seems that using the Windows Classic skin fixes the bug, and the page renders fine (if a little uninteresting, it's basically a long page with a box on it). It BSODs on Windows Basic and Aero. I haven't a clue if this is a real fix, or if it's just that the magic number needed to crash the system is different with Windows Classic compared with Basic / Aero. Windows XP (32 bit) is fine as well (again page renders fine, no crashes of anything).

I personally think it's largely a Windows bug, even if Safari has a bug (that oddly only does anything on one version of Windows, and even then only with certain conditions), a programme doing something stupid should not crash the entire OS.

You can switch back to an old style status bar on IE9. (Other stuff like the menu bar can be switched back on as well, should you want to replicate most of IE's traditional cluttered interface).

Personally, the status bar thing in Firefox 4 confused me, don't like the single menu button? Switch back to a menu bar. Don't like the new tab position? Just switch it back to the old style. But want the old status bar back? No way, it's our way or the highway (well, a third party extension).

32 bit programmes (with the large address aware flag set) get 4GB of address space on 64 bit Windows, compared to 2GB / 3GB on 32 bit Windows.

iOS devices can only play a certain subset of MP4 files, not all codec / bitrate / resolution combinations will work. Whatever settings you used for the video side of things are presumably incompatible in some way.

I've personally not had trouble with the few videos I've converted to MP4 for my iPod, but I used Handbrake (which has a set of presets for various Apple devices) not this Format Factory thing.

You seem to be attempting to engage in Apple bashing, and that's fine here as well. It's a pity the article you linked to doesn't back up your assertion that TTFs contain executable code, at least not in the normal sense (it mentions code for a virtual machine to run hinting, but not normal executable code). This doesn't seem to be any issue with the True Type format itself, just an issue with Microsoft's implementation of it.

Seeing as speed (on 15+ year old equipment) was the reason they did it, you're not going to get an answer you like.

People said Windows NT was too slow on their 486s, so one of the things Microsoft did to try and fix that was to move the GDI into the kernel. They didn't think the security and stability side through however, and I doubt if many people are going to call it the greatest decision ever made in the design of an OS.

There are various "luxury" manufacturers, like a Nokia subsidiary called Vertu, who will happily sell you a phone for £8600. If Wikipedia is to be believed, it runs the might power of Symbian, that most prestigious, high end powerhorse of phone OSs (well, actually EPOC32 was nice back in the day...).

There seem to be a few more specialised "luxury" companies, like Goldvish and Mobiado, as well as ones branded as Dior, Tag Heuer etc. They all seem to be what would be considered feature phones (or perhaps low end smartphones in some cases) in stupidly expensive cases. But it's hard to tell, as the actual phone software and specs doesn't seem to be the main focus with these phones for some reason...

It's a bit more complex than that, Opera sort of had tabs since about version 4 / 5 before Firefox started as a project (I don't think the Mozilla Suite had got to 1.0 either?), but seeing as it hadn't really been decided that the UI for tabs should be tabs, it presented tabs using a Windows taskbar style metaphor. The UI for "tabs" was adjusted to be tabs after a while, which was after a few other browsers started using tabs, but that was mostly a skin change, and not some major rewrite.

I guess the question about if Opera had tabs [first / early on / whatever] depends one quite how far tabs have to be to the final version that most browsers use nowadays. If you go for the idea of a single window containing multiple web pages switched between though a row of widgets, than Opera had them. However if the switcher had to specifically be a row of tabs at the top of the screen and not a row of buttons on the bottom, Opera didn't.

As one of Opera's five users, I will say that its defaults are fairly Chrome / modern Firefox-ish already. Opera always had tabs above the address bar, not below, and newer versions have a minimalist UI (like a Firefox style single menu), as is the style nowadays. I wish they hadn't followed the general theme of making everything monochrome though.

Opera has a fairly flexible set of UI settings, and a reasonable skinning system so you can turn off most of this minimalism and go back to something more traditional if you want.

The fact that they were aimed at resellers [/ IT departments etc] doesn't make them any less funny though. Stupid marketing stuff is still stupid marketing no matter what the intended audience.

You've got you're ECHO ON / OFF the wrong way round, I think:

ECHO OFF
ECHO HAPPY BIRTHDAY MS-DOS
ECHO ON

is perhaps more what you want. But the initial ECHO OFF is still echoed, so perhaps

@ECHO OFF
ECHO HAPPY BIRTHDAY MS-DOS
ECHO ON

is better, to suppress the initial ECHO OFF being itself echoed. But ECHO ON at the end of a batch file isn't needed, so it could be:

@ECHO OFF
ECHO HAPPY BIRTHDAY MS-DOS

without problems. Of course

@ECHO HAPPY BIRTHDAY MS-DOS

is even shorter, if you're only using a single command in a batch file, why have a second just to turn command echoing off when you could use @ to suppress echoing a single line?.

This pedantry brought to you by boredom, available now at all good newsagents. To celebrate MS-DOS I did actually test all the above by the power of COPY CON, as 64 bit Windows doesn't actually include MS-DOS support, so COPY CON in cmd.exe was the nearest I could get to the good old days (it's also probably better than EDLIN).

/ Some DOS 3.x version (3.31?) on a PC-XT clone with 512kb of RAM, EGA graphics and 10 whole megabytes of hard disk space was the first DOS for me.

Wow, that and the second half of the Windows 386 promo, you really wonder where you can get the shit the Microsoft marketing department used to smoke.

A random sidenote is that "No PC should be without it" was clearly something the Windows NT team believed, as AFAIK most of the MS-DOS tools in (32-bit) Windows NT (command, mem, edlin[1] etc) are from DOS 5 and were never updated.

[1] For some reason they never got rid of edlin in NT unlike DOS / Win9x where it disappeared around DOS 6. It was still around on my XP box, is it still around on 32 bit Windows 7?

OK then, when will I be able to run Android on my Acorn A4000. :-)