Starts? This has been ongoing for a long time.

Front page of Slashdot again wooo!

Couple of small corrections since I wrote that...

There is an Electron port and a version of VScode available.

The thing about Groff in core is really old and it's long gone.

> exposed to 196C

No. That is nearly twice the boiling point of water and would destroy any protein.

You ommitted both the units and the sign.

The article says:

> exposed to 196C

*Minus* 196 C. DEGREES centigrade. Kelvin is the one that isn't measured in degrees, and 196 K isn't too bad. I have survived that frequently myself. It's a very cold day up a mountain.
 

Exactly. Came here to say this. I suspect a bunch of people didn't edit or proof this and the originator is a lazy thief and used an LLM bot.

20mg tracker on a 600mg butterfly? Why not say it's a 60kg person carrying a 2kg backpack? That's meaningful and it's not much at all.

...you realize that pennies don't solve that "problem," right? We already have to round the final total for virtually all purchases after calculating the tax.

I wrote this article.

I don't think so, no. It's a local feature, not online, entirely optional, and you are perfectly free to ignore it, not turn it on, and use FFmpeg as before.

The size of the binary of FFmpeg is a rounding error compared to the many gigabytes of the video files it takes as input and emits. If you do not enable the Whisper model I am not even sure it'll take any additional memory at runtime.

> GNOME actually works decently on it

On a Surface Go? Touchscreen and all?

Is it usable without a keyboard and mouse? And if so, fully usable?

I have other questions but those are the significant ones. I don't know how anyone syncs books from a router -- huh? -- or how a dinghy would help. To me that is a small boat, either a sail powered or a rubber inflatable boat.

This is intriguing to me.

Just last week, we received notification that IBM is rolling out a "program" to upper-level employees with decades of experience. The idea is that we would work reduced hours for the next year at full pay, and then leave IBM after a year (next March, I believe.)

Of course, this is for US employees only. I think we can be sure that the replacements for these employees (if there are any) won't be in the US.

You didn't "cut cable" if you didn't have it in the first place; the number they're citing is a percentage of total households without cable, not the number of total households that had cable and got rid of it.

Agreed.

"AI" is the last thing I want. I have changed my browser settings to _block_ "AI" generated results.

I did not know DDG was run by the same sort of idiotic blind fashion-followers. This is sad news.

It's odd.

I get a strange mix of feedback. Some from people who call me a jerk etc., and if they go into detail, that usually means they did not understand what I wrote. And the rest says "thank you for writing this. So few people understand. We are really glad someone does."

I work hard on _not_ being hostile, confrontational, and rude.

But, to quote Bill Hicks:

'I don't mean to sound bitter, cold, or cruel, but I am, so that's how it comes out.'

It was "proven false" by mathematicians who considered the number 200,000 to be the same as "infinite."

The thing is that XMS is only for data. A real mode DOS binary can't put code there: the addresses are out of range. Only the 64kB of the HMA could hold executable code: 1024-1088kB.

XMS allows a DOS app running on a 286 or 386 to store blocks of data above 1088kB, but the programmer gets no more space for their executable at all.

While EMS _also_ gave you lots more storage, but was much longer established, and it worked on an 8088/8086 and didn't need a 286.

If you wanted bigger *programs* then they had to run in protected mode. To do that and access DOS services meant using a DOS extender, and that did mean paying, but it allowed you to have (a theoretical max of) 16MB programs on a 286 PC and 4GB programs on a 386 PC.

(Not that anyone had 4GB of RAM in an x86 PC in the 20th century.)

So, the choice was:
* EMS: runs on anything, highly compatible, only gets you more data
* XMS: only runs on >= 80286, less compatible, only gets you more data
* DOS Extender: only runs on >= 80286, less compatible, but you get up to 25x bigger programs and almost all the restrictions of plain old DOS go away.

Not a tough choice.

If you used Watcom C, you got Tenberry DOS/4G (or DOS/16) for free.

https://web.archive.org/web/20...

The point is that XMS was next to no use to DOS apps.

"Please, help me, I am so thirsty... I have not had any water in 2 days."
"Certainly, sir, welcome to our petrol station. Feel free to drink as much petrol as you want."

Still not convinced you're not using an LLM bot to come up with this. :-)

Things like:

> I made a mistake in my previous comment. Contrary to what I wrote, DOS programs running under Windows on a 8086 or 80286 cannot use DPMI

Are _exactly_ the sort of thing I expect from ChatGPT or similar when told it's wrong. I could not write a better pastiche of LLM bot output.

Your claims about Windows are still all over the shop.

Yes, it could pre-empt DOS VMs. No, that does not mean they could be swapped. They couldn't. No, it does not mean they had their own memory spaces. They didn't. Pre-386 versions of Windows had to run all DOS apps in the same memory space, and that was the same space as Windows itself.

No, they could not use any API to give more memory to DOS apps.

No, before Windows 3.0, Windows apps could not be kept in XMS or run in XMS.

There is a good history here published a few days ago:

https://www.ninakalinina.com/n...

Yes you can run DOS in a VM. That is not the same as V86 mode.

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

V86 mode was not a hypervisor. Significantly, V86 mode made it easier for an OS to communicate with its DOS apps. They all shared the samefilesystem, for instance. That's harder with a hypervisor.

Now, this matters less because software can just emulate a whole DOS PC, like DOSbox does. You don't need clever bypasses when you can emulate the entire hardware and software and just do whatever you can program.