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Comment Sign and units missing! (Score 1) 34

> 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.
 

Comment Re:Shit (Score 5, Informative) 33

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.

Comment Re:Using GNOME on a tablet (Score 1) 40

> 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.

Comment Don't believe this for one second. (Score 4, Informative) 42

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.

Comment Re: I saw OS 2 back in the day. (Score 1) 167

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.'

Comment Re: I saw OS 2 back in the day. (Score 1) 167

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...

Comment Re: I saw OS 2 back in the day. (Score 1) 167

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.

Comment Re: I saw OS 2 back in the day. (Score 1) 167

> 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. DPMI is available only to the Windows kernel itself in Windows 3.x Standard mode. Sorry for that, my memory is getting fuzzy. But XMS is still available, so the point stands.

This sounds like the output of an LLM bot.

As such, I think I'm trying to argue with a machine acting as a spammer.

> There is yet another thing I can't remember clearly (but can learn again by some testing). I'm not sure that the total memory footprint of all loaded DOS apps under real or standard mode Windows 3.x can't be more than 640Kb. It could be true, or not. Windows real/standard mode can swap out the memory belonging to an inactive DOS app to a disk file and restore it on task switch, as far as I can recall.

What is the point of this?

Only Windows 2/386 or 3.x in 386 Enhanced mode has multiple virtual DOS boxes, can swap, etc.

> There is a hacked "NTVDM" for 64-bit Windows, called NTVDMx64. AFAIK, it can run DOS apps under 64-bit Windows using one of two methods - a limited CPU emulator from Insignia that was used in the old non-Intel versions of Windows NT, or using HAXM, which to my limited understanding means using the Intel virtualization extensions to achieve the same result as the V86 mode.

I have written about this:

https://www.theregister.com/20...

For anyone else reading, I think @vbdasc is a software bot, and this looks exactly like "AI" bot slop: a jumbled mess of inconsistent fragments ofthe bot's input data.

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