The DOS-based line included everything up to WfW 3.11 (or 3.2 in China), 95, 98 and ME, albeit MS went to some lengths to stop you booting into real mode with ME.
The NT line started in 1992 with NT 3.1, then went through 4, 2000 (Workstation was renamed to Pro), XP, Vista and so on.
Even though I have a connection more than capable of handling the streaming there's no way I'd ever want to stream my games.
Lag aside (and it's inevitable there will be some, simply due to the physics), the lacklustre hardware they're using to render hardly fills me with excitement - heck, even my laptop is faster than their hardware (I use a Clevo desktop replacement, on the basis that if I'm going to be gaming outside of home, it'll be at a friend's place or a hotel, so will have a desk and power).
Still, for those who don't mind lag, don't mind compression artifacts and who have the bandwidth it'll be fine. The rise of streaming audio and video shows that up well enough - I'd rather have a blu-ray with high bitrate and minimal artifacts, but most people would disagree.
If you dig deeper into the UK, at least, we have some ageing nuclear reactors and a real reluctance to build new ones (it seems we have to import the know-how and nukes have a real image problem).
It's a pity: one of the fads we have now is importing "biomass" (i.e. bits of chopped-down Canadian trees) by boat, then burning it. That counts as "renewable", but it's clearly not in the same league as wind, solar and hydro. I'd far rather see another nuclear plant or two built and leave the trees for the Canadians, it seems most wasteful shipping them a third of the way around the world to be burnt.
Gas isn't too good either, but it at least beats coal... that has been very much in the minority now.
I'm assuming the USA doesn't have to go to France (or China!) to get their nuclear reactors as we do.
I find it interesting seeing the mix used in power generation over in the States - I'd always assumed nuclear would have played a much bigger role. I'm also surprised at just how much energy is put out by hydro power, albeit that site only refers to a chunk of the USA rather than the entirety.
As I write this, the majority of the power in the National Grid in the UK is being supplied by wind - but that's not surprising as it's presently windy across much of the country. That's one of the perks of being a small island nation, there's plenty of wind around!
Maybe it's different over there in the States, but here in Europe there are plenty of companies selling bare-bones laptops (by the likes of MSI and Clevo) without an OS installed. As components these days are largely standard (same chipsets, same CPUs, same GPUs), Linux runs just as well on them as it does on companies who make a point of mentioning Linux.
Buy one of those, boot up Ubuntu from a memory stick and bam, all done.
(I guess if you want someone to install Linux for you at the factory your options are more limited, but if you're thinking of Linux rather than Windows I'm sure you're more than capable of booting from USB and installing it yourself!)
...and the same stuff will be available in a Clevo chassis for much less than Dell are charging.
I use one of Clevo's previous generation machines with an i7-6700K and a GTX 1080, with a 17" 4K screen. It's absolutely gorgeous, even if it does weigh half a ton!
The price of that was something like £1000 (~$1270) less than the big-brands were charging.
(And yes, you're lucky to get an hour out of it on battery, even just surfing the Web. It's designed to be plugged in, perhaps in an airport lounge or a hotel rather than used on the bus!)
My next laptop will be another desktop-replacement from Clevo. Once you've experienced the power of a desktop CPU in a laptop, as opposed to the constantly-throttling, castrasted "H" series chips, you won't want to go back
The ironic thing with this story is that 13 years ago, before Spotify and the like, HMV offered digital downloads (as did many other shops, like Tesco and Virgin Records). The downloads were clunky, required Windows Media Player and if you stopped paying the monthly subscription you lost access to the downloads entirely - they'd just redirect you to a login screen if you tried playing them. I only lasted two months as a subscriber back in the day as I realised I'd be stuck paying £10/month forever just to keep access to the tracks I'd downloaded. I still have the (now useless) WMA files as a souvenir!
The modern way of downloading music to keep (MP3s via Amazon, for example), is much better, as the music doesn't expire.
It doesn't make any sense whatsoever, especially as we don't even get a day off work out of it as they do in the States! It seems to have taken over from the traditional Boxing Day/January sales here in the UK, even though those sales were a place to pick up a bargain (in terms of unsold stock brought in for the Christmas rush).
If anything, it seems to have hastened the demise of our High Streets, as people now expect discounts (whether real or imagined) before Christmas rather than afterwards... right during what used to be peak profit-making season.
I work in a school in the UK. I'm currently having arguments over exactly this subject: the powers that be want to roll out Google quickly (having already wasted *lots* of money on some iPads a few years ago, and Asus eeePCs before that). Apparently I'm the only IT guy across the multi-academy Trust who's been kicking up a stink, the rest have just rolled over and moved to Google, Chromebooks and all.
We presently have just under 1000 PCs and laptops running Windows 10 and Office 2016 / Office 365 (the latter for its easier integration with Gmail - feedback is people hate the Gmail website but get on well with Outlook). I'm doing my damndest to make sure that any new devices also run Windows and Office, so as to hook into our existing network. Pointing out that cheap laptops can do everything a Chromebook can, plus hook into our existing infrastructure has delayed the Chromebook push for now (they've already had experience with how awkward printing / file access was with the iPads). I still strongly feel that this whole one-device-per-child thing is a colosal waste of time and taxpayer money, but the sellers in education do a really good job of painting a Utopian picture of classrooms full of kids all eagerly collaborating with teacher. (What actually happens, of course, is a good chunk off them instead browse photos / websites / play games etc).
It doesn't help that there are political moves afoot to force a move to Google, such as banning removable drives (which I'm resisting, currently enforcing Bitlocker for write access). Banning removable drives would, of course, stop our SLR cameras in Photography from working, stop teachers recording the children using our video cameras on the school farm (for Animal Care), stop audio CDs being burnt for speaking and listening exams in French, stop them recording performances in Drama (again, on nice video cameras), stop potential teachers and people coming in from outside using memory sticks for their lessons / presentations and much more besides.
Google Apps isn't perfect either - as well as having less-than-great viewers for Office formats, it has no answer for Access, something which is deeply embedded in the curriculum. That means we need Office and proper PCs in our IT suites... and as such we may as well keep it elsewhere too.
I suspect, though, that eventually moves will be made to move our network storage to Google Drive, despite the lack of being able, for example, to get an Access database back from last Tuesday, as it's been overwritten by mistake. They're already planning to migrate email away from Exchange to Gmail by next summer.
Mind you, there is one thing from all this. I was brought up with Windows (2) and Office (Word 1, Excel 2) at school back in the 90s. It's quite true that if you get them at school, they'll carry it over into their adult lives...
Metronet doesn't exist any more, it was bought out by PlusNet some years ago.
Entanet is a "white-label" wholesale ISP, you can only get its services via a reseller. It's perfectly fine and, like all the others I've used, on my exchange it uses BT wholesale for its backhaul.
Merula is my current ISP and has been absolutely fine - I get something like 72Mbps no matter whether it's day or night, not least because I'm not contending with many other users at the exchange. It also makes "elevated best efforts" available, which increases your traffic priority on BT's network.
I'll be moving to a fibre-on-demand connection with Cerberus soon - they also use BT's backhaul and, unlike larger ISPs, also give access to the whole of the Web. Yes, including the bits that BT retail (as opposed to wholesale), Sky, TalkTalk and the rest block.
"The floppy driver Win10 removes is the standard AT floppy controller one;"
While it's true that some beta builds of Windows 10 removed the standard floppy driver (flpydisk.sys - which is all of 26K in size), it was restored in time for the final release. It's still in the latest builds of Windows 10, too.
I would imagine though that it's gone in Windows 10 Lean.
...and that explains why "a cup of char" is a way of referencing a cup of tea. I always thought it was odd slang, now I know it's actually distorted Chinese.
I got my hopes up on reading this - had MS cracked the lightweight, high-performance bracket by shoving desktop components in a slimline laptop?
Nope. It's the same old crummy performance-of-a-cucumber U processor, albeit with a semi-decent GPU.
For now, the limited number of genuinely "desktop" laptops remains as it is. I'm wriitng this on one (with a desktop i7-6700K processor and a "desktop equivalent" GeForce 1080 - and of course this laptop is nowhere near as thin and light as the Surface. I'd rather have the power on tap, though, even if it is a bit of a pain lugging it around airports and such!
MS certainly does care about compatibility, it's why the x86 version of Windows is still produced. (You can still run 36-year-old programs just by double-clicking them on 32-bit Windows - and, of course, it still runs legacy 16-bit Windows programs too).
Your mistake was doing an in-place upgrade to Windows 10. You should have done a fresh install, then reinstalled your 31 mission critical programs thereafter.
(Disclaimer: I work in a school and have had to get all sorts of legacy stuff working under Windows 10. The only thing that wouldn't work whatsoever was an old ID badge printer which used an obscure way of interacting with its Windows 2000-era driver. The rest of the stuff, including such delights as old laser cutters connected by serial ports, works just fine. Yes, you may have to fiddle with settings and even the registry in some cases, but the vast majority of stuff out there can be made to work with little or no effort.)
Well, my mum died at 48 and my dad died at 67, so it's all anecdotal. As my grandfathers both died at 62 I reckon I'll be doing well if I manage to last until 70!
Just in case I do, though, I'm making sure I have adequate pension provision, both by paying in at work and by using a SIPP, which is a scheme whereby the Government tops up your contributions by 25%. Anything that's left in the SIPP when you die is free of inheritance tax.
Mine was a (second-hand) Commodore Plus/4 in 1988, for my 9th birthday. It conked out two days later and it took a while to get it fixed.
It was a good little system: 64K RAM, 128-colour graphics, tape drive, disk drive and a printer, plus a programming manual and a shedload of games. The major downside was that nobody else had one and it was pretty hard to find software; bargain bins in small computer shops and boot fairs (not sure what they're called in the US!) were the places to look. My friends all had other computers: a mix of BBC micros (for the posh kids), ZX Spectrums and C64s (for everyone else) and even the odd Amiga.
I owe a lot to that Plus/4 - it had a primitive word processor, database and spreadsheet in ROM, so introduced me to office software. It of course had BASIC and I was able to dabble with code, although it was more of the "guess the number and win points" type of game rather than anything sophisticated.
That system lasted me for 3 years, by which time my dad rescued an old IBM XT from his work (they'd chucked it into a skip). That gave me an interest in PCs and I've never looked back!
Early in 1994 (when I was 14) I thought of a masterplan at school. We'd had some brand new 486SX/25 machines delivered and I knew they'd be able to play Doom, the game everyone wanted. We also had a 10Base2 network installed and I'd found they'd forgotten to disable booting from a floppy. Handily, they had DOS IPX packet drivers on the C drive of each machine.
As luck would have it, the head of IT was due to visit a conference in London one afternoon, meaning the IT rooms would be unguarded. I arranged with some friends to "bunk off" of Games, a subject I hated... I was (and still am) rubbish at football, hockey etc. We snuck into the main IT room, left the lights off and got to work. 10 minutes later there was a roaring (albeit mute) game of deathmatch Doom in full swing... we were having a great time of it!
Just as I was introducing my chainsaw to my best friend's face, the door burst open, the lights went on.... and the head of IT walked in, a look of absolute amazement on his face as his gaze moved across the screens. It turns out the conference in London had been cancelled at the last minute.
Expecting the rollocking of a lifetime, all that happened was that he said "Boys, you shouldn't be in here!" We turned off the PCs and left for the library, in disbelief at what had just happened.
Years later, I suspect that the head of IT was singularly impressed at what we'd got the school PCs to do, but of course he couldn't condone it. I don't know about him, but I ended up logging hundreds of hours at home over the coming years playing co-op and deathmatch Doom (and Doom 2) with friends, family and eventually complete strangers over the Internet.
This is even more daft when you consider that it's only the big ISPs that block those sites anyway. Smaller ISPs, even though they go via BT's network, still allow access to them all.
Heck, back when Wikipedia was blocked a few years ago (due to a contentious album cover) I could still access it via my ISP at the time, Entanet... which meant they weren't even implementing the super-secret block list as operated by the Internet Watch Foundation.
It's an Atom, just one that's been rebaged to a Celeron. The performance is absolutely terrible and even a cheap i3 would beat it hands-down! It's a shame Intel have diluted their product range like this as it leads to confusion (as you've demonstrated).
Dual-core Pentiums and Celerons (in the vein of those since the Wolfdale days) are still made, of course, and these days are merely cut-down i3s. The Atom-based Pentium and Celerons are a relatively new invention and the easy way to spot them is to see whether they're advertised as quad-core or not; quad-core Pentiums and Celerons are just beefier Atoms.
The weather event of 2015 for me, being in the UK, was the way December was absurdly warm... breaking the record going back to 1659, in fact.
The most amazing thing was that it wasn't broken by a small amount, either; the old record was 8.1C and the new record is 9.7C. I daresay I'll never see anything like that again in my lifetime!
They do, the i7-5960X is a consumer, unlocked i7 chip. Loads of cache, no integrated graphics and a whacking great price because there's zero competition.
(Of course, the X99 chips are only Haswell, but as the IPC improvements are minimal with Skylake they're still worth considering - especially the 6-core i7-5820K, which is actually cheaper than the new quad-core Skylake i7 here in the UK. The X99 chips are essentially Xeons with some bits turned off and overclocking enabled. They have vt-d enabled, amongst other things).
Slashdot Mirror
Your timeline is a bit out.
The DOS-based line included everything up to WfW 3.11 (or 3.2 in China), 95, 98 and ME, albeit MS went to some lengths to stop you booting into real mode with ME.
The NT line started in 1992 with NT 3.1, then went through 4, 2000 (Workstation was renamed to Pro), XP, Vista and so on.
Even though I have a connection more than capable of handling the streaming there's no way I'd ever want to stream my games.
Lag aside (and it's inevitable there will be some, simply due to the physics), the lacklustre hardware they're using to render hardly fills me with excitement - heck, even my laptop is faster than their hardware (I use a Clevo desktop replacement, on the basis that if I'm going to be gaming outside of home, it'll be at a friend's place or a hotel, so will have a desk and power).
Still, for those who don't mind lag, don't mind compression artifacts and who have the bandwidth it'll be fine. The rise of streaming audio and video shows that up well enough - I'd rather have a blu-ray with high bitrate and minimal artifacts, but most people would disagree.
If you dig deeper into the UK, at least, we have some ageing nuclear reactors and a real reluctance to build new ones (it seems we have to import the know-how and nukes have a real image problem).
It's a pity: one of the fads we have now is importing "biomass" (i.e. bits of chopped-down Canadian trees) by boat, then burning it. That counts as "renewable", but it's clearly not in the same league as wind, solar and hydro. I'd far rather see another nuclear plant or two built and leave the trees for the Canadians, it seems most wasteful shipping them a third of the way around the world to be burnt.
Gas isn't too good either, but it at least beats coal... that has been very much in the minority now.
I'm assuming the USA doesn't have to go to France (or China!) to get their nuclear reactors as we do.
I find it interesting seeing the mix used in power generation over in the States - I'd always assumed nuclear would have played a much bigger role. I'm also surprised at just how much energy is put out by hydro power, albeit that site only refers to a chunk of the USA rather than the entirety.
As I write this, the majority of the power in the National Grid in the UK is being supplied by wind - but that's not surprising as it's presently windy across much of the country. That's one of the perks of being a small island nation, there's plenty of wind around!
http://gridwatch.co.uk/ shows the stats.
This just seems like an advert.
Maybe it's different over there in the States, but here in Europe there are plenty of companies selling bare-bones laptops (by the likes of MSI and Clevo) without an OS installed. As components these days are largely standard (same chipsets, same CPUs, same GPUs), Linux runs just as well on them as it does on companies who make a point of mentioning Linux.
Buy one of those, boot up Ubuntu from a memory stick and bam, all done.
(I guess if you want someone to install Linux for you at the factory your options are more limited, but if you're thinking of Linux rather than Windows I'm sure you're more than capable of booting from USB and installing it yourself!)
...and the same stuff will be available in a Clevo chassis for much less than Dell are charging.
I use one of Clevo's previous generation machines with an i7-6700K and a GTX 1080, with a 17" 4K screen. It's absolutely gorgeous, even if it does weigh half a ton!
The price of that was something like £1000 (~$1270) less than the big-brands were charging.
(And yes, you're lucky to get an hour out of it on battery, even just surfing the Web. It's designed to be plugged in, perhaps in an airport lounge or a hotel rather than used on the bus!)
My next laptop will be another desktop-replacement from Clevo. Once you've experienced the power of a desktop CPU in a laptop, as opposed to the constantly-throttling, castrasted "H" series chips, you won't want to go back
The ironic thing with this story is that 13 years ago, before Spotify and the like, HMV offered digital downloads (as did many other shops, like Tesco and Virgin Records). The downloads were clunky, required Windows Media Player and if you stopped paying the monthly subscription you lost access to the downloads entirely - they'd just redirect you to a login screen if you tried playing them. I only lasted two months as a subscriber back in the day as I realised I'd be stuck paying £10/month forever just to keep access to the tracks I'd downloaded. I still have the (now useless) WMA files as a souvenir!
The modern way of downloading music to keep (MP3s via Amazon, for example), is much better, as the music doesn't expire.
It doesn't make any sense whatsoever, especially as we don't even get a day off work out of it as they do in the States! It seems to have taken over from the traditional Boxing Day/January sales here in the UK, even though those sales were a place to pick up a bargain (in terms of unsold stock brought in for the Christmas rush).
If anything, it seems to have hastened the demise of our High Streets, as people now expect discounts (whether real or imagined) before Christmas rather than afterwards... right during what used to be peak profit-making season.
I work in a school in the UK. I'm currently having arguments over exactly this subject: the powers that be want to roll out Google quickly (having already wasted *lots* of money on some iPads a few years ago, and Asus eeePCs before that). Apparently I'm the only IT guy across the multi-academy Trust who's been kicking up a stink, the rest have just rolled over and moved to Google, Chromebooks and all.
We presently have just under 1000 PCs and laptops running Windows 10 and Office 2016 / Office 365 (the latter for its easier integration with Gmail - feedback is people hate the Gmail website but get on well with Outlook). I'm doing my damndest to make sure that any new devices also run Windows and Office, so as to hook into our existing network. Pointing out that cheap laptops can do everything a Chromebook can, plus hook into our existing infrastructure has delayed the Chromebook push for now (they've already had experience with how awkward printing / file access was with the iPads). I still strongly feel that this whole one-device-per-child thing is a colosal waste of time and taxpayer money, but the sellers in education do a really good job of painting a Utopian picture of classrooms full of kids all eagerly collaborating with teacher. (What actually happens, of course, is a good chunk off them instead browse photos / websites / play games etc).
It doesn't help that there are political moves afoot to force a move to Google, such as banning removable drives (which I'm resisting, currently enforcing Bitlocker for write access). Banning removable drives would, of course, stop our SLR cameras in Photography from working, stop teachers recording the children using our video cameras on the school farm (for Animal Care), stop audio CDs being burnt for speaking and listening exams in French, stop them recording performances in Drama (again, on nice video cameras), stop potential teachers and people coming in from outside using memory sticks for their lessons / presentations and much more besides.
Google Apps isn't perfect either - as well as having less-than-great viewers for Office formats, it has no answer for Access, something which is deeply embedded in the curriculum. That means we need Office and proper PCs in our IT suites... and as such we may as well keep it elsewhere too.
I suspect, though, that eventually moves will be made to move our network storage to Google Drive, despite the lack of being able, for example, to get an Access database back from last Tuesday, as it's been overwritten by mistake. They're already planning to migrate email away from Exchange to Gmail by next summer.
Mind you, there is one thing from all this. I was brought up with Windows (2) and Office (Word 1, Excel 2) at school back in the 90s. It's quite true that if you get them at school, they'll carry it over into their adult lives...
What an odd, ill-informed comment!
Metronet doesn't exist any more, it was bought out by PlusNet some years ago.
Entanet is a "white-label" wholesale ISP, you can only get its services via a reseller. It's perfectly fine and, like all the others I've used, on my exchange it uses BT wholesale for its backhaul.
Merula is my current ISP and has been absolutely fine - I get something like 72Mbps no matter whether it's day or night, not least because I'm not contending with many other users at the exchange. It also makes "elevated best efforts" available, which increases your traffic priority on BT's network.
I'll be moving to a fibre-on-demand connection with Cerberus soon - they also use BT's backhaul and, unlike larger ISPs, also give access to the whole of the Web. Yes, including the bits that BT retail (as opposed to wholesale), Sky, TalkTalk and the rest block.
No it's not. A few ISPs have blocked it, but none of the ones I've used in recent years (Metronet, Entanet, Merula) have blocked it.
"The floppy driver Win10 removes is the standard AT floppy controller one;"
While it's true that some beta builds of Windows 10 removed the standard floppy driver (flpydisk.sys - which is all of 26K in size), it was restored in time for the final release. It's still in the latest builds of Windows 10, too.
I would imagine though that it's gone in Windows 10 Lean.
...and that explains why "a cup of char" is a way of referencing a cup of tea. I always thought it was odd slang, now I know it's actually distorted Chinese.
http://www.rmg.co.uk/discover/... has more (Royal Museums Greenwich).
I got my hopes up on reading this - had MS cracked the lightweight, high-performance bracket by shoving desktop components in a slimline laptop?
Nope. It's the same old crummy performance-of-a-cucumber U processor, albeit with a semi-decent GPU.
For now, the limited number of genuinely "desktop" laptops remains as it is. I'm wriitng this on one (with a desktop i7-6700K processor and a "desktop equivalent" GeForce 1080 - and of course this laptop is nowhere near as thin and light as the Surface. I'd rather have the power on tap, though, even if it is a bit of a pain lugging it around airports and such!
MS certainly does care about compatibility, it's why the x86 version of Windows is still produced. (You can still run 36-year-old programs just by double-clicking them on 32-bit Windows - and, of course, it still runs legacy 16-bit Windows programs too).
Your mistake was doing an in-place upgrade to Windows 10. You should have done a fresh install, then reinstalled your 31 mission critical programs thereafter.
(Disclaimer: I work in a school and have had to get all sorts of legacy stuff working under Windows 10. The only thing that wouldn't work whatsoever was an old ID badge printer which used an obscure way of interacting with its Windows 2000-era driver. The rest of the stuff, including such delights as old laser cutters connected by serial ports, works just fine. Yes, you may have to fiddle with settings and even the registry in some cases, but the vast majority of stuff out there can be made to work with little or no effort.)
Well, my mum died at 48 and my dad died at 67, so it's all anecdotal. As my grandfathers both died at 62 I reckon I'll be doing well if I manage to last until 70!
Just in case I do, though, I'm making sure I have adequate pension provision, both by paying in at work and by using a SIPP, which is a scheme whereby the Government tops up your contributions by 25%. Anything that's left in the SIPP when you die is free of inheritance tax.
Mine was a (second-hand) Commodore Plus/4 in 1988, for my 9th birthday. It conked out two days later and it took a while to get it fixed.
It was a good little system: 64K RAM, 128-colour graphics, tape drive, disk drive and a printer, plus a programming manual and a shedload of games. The major downside was that nobody else had one and it was pretty hard to find software; bargain bins in small computer shops and boot fairs (not sure what they're called in the US!) were the places to look. My friends all had other computers: a mix of BBC micros (for the posh kids), ZX Spectrums and C64s (for everyone else) and even the odd Amiga.
I owe a lot to that Plus/4 - it had a primitive word processor, database and spreadsheet in ROM, so introduced me to office software. It of course had BASIC and I was able to dabble with code, although it was more of the "guess the number and win points" type of game rather than anything sophisticated.
That system lasted me for 3 years, by which time my dad rescued an old IBM XT from his work (they'd chucked it into a skip). That gave me an interest in PCs and I've never looked back!
Early in 1994 (when I was 14) I thought of a masterplan at school. We'd had some brand new 486SX/25 machines delivered and I knew they'd be able to play Doom, the game everyone wanted. We also had a 10Base2 network installed and I'd found they'd forgotten to disable booting from a floppy. Handily, they had DOS IPX packet drivers on the C drive of each machine.
As luck would have it, the head of IT was due to visit a conference in London one afternoon, meaning the IT rooms would be unguarded. I arranged with some friends to "bunk off" of Games, a subject I hated... I was (and still am) rubbish at football, hockey etc. We snuck into the main IT room, left the lights off and got to work. 10 minutes later there was a roaring (albeit mute) game of deathmatch Doom in full swing... we were having a great time of it!
Just as I was introducing my chainsaw to my best friend's face, the door burst open, the lights went on.... and the head of IT walked in, a look of absolute amazement on his face as his gaze moved across the screens. It turns out the conference in London had been cancelled at the last minute.
Expecting the rollocking of a lifetime, all that happened was that he said "Boys, you shouldn't be in here!"
We turned off the PCs and left for the library, in disbelief at what had just happened.
Years later, I suspect that the head of IT was singularly impressed at what we'd got the school PCs to do, but of course he couldn't condone it. I don't know about him, but I ended up logging hundreds of hours at home over the coming years playing co-op and deathmatch Doom (and Doom 2) with friends, family and eventually complete strangers over the Internet.
Happy times.
The Redstone builds of Windows 10 (14295 onwards) have added ANSI emulation too - only 30-odd years after DOS brought us ansi.sys.
This is even more daft when you consider that it's only the big ISPs that block those sites anyway. Smaller ISPs, even though they go via BT's network, still allow access to them all.
Heck, back when Wikipedia was blocked a few years ago (due to a contentious album cover) I could still access it via my ISP at the time, Entanet... which meant they weren't even implementing the super-secret block list as operated by the Internet Watch Foundation.
It's an Atom, just one that's been rebaged to a Celeron. The performance is absolutely terrible and even a cheap i3 would beat it hands-down! It's a shame Intel have diluted their product range like this as it leads to confusion (as you've demonstrated).
Dual-core Pentiums and Celerons (in the vein of those since the Wolfdale days) are still made, of course, and these days are merely cut-down i3s. The Atom-based Pentium and Celerons are a relatively new invention and the easy way to spot them is to see whether they're advertised as quad-core or not; quad-core Pentiums and Celerons are just beefier Atoms.
Quad core 1.8 to 2 GHz, eh? Sounds like an Atom, or a rebadged variant thereof (Celeron, Pentium).
It won't hold a candle to the higher-end mobile quad-core chips, such as an i7 or some of the latest mobile i5s.
The weather event of 2015 for me, being in the UK, was the way December was absurdly warm... breaking the record going back to 1659, in fact.
The most amazing thing was that it wasn't broken by a small amount, either; the old record was 8.1C and the new record is 9.7C. I daresay I'll never see anything like that again in my lifetime!
Try this link:
http://www.flyertalk.com/forum...
(If you search Flyertalk - via Google - you'll find other snippets of info too.)
They do, the i7-5960X is a consumer, unlocked i7 chip. Loads of cache, no integrated graphics and a whacking great price because there's zero competition.
(Of course, the X99 chips are only Haswell, but as the IPC improvements are minimal with Skylake they're still worth considering - especially the 6-core i7-5820K, which is actually cheaper than the new quad-core Skylake i7 here in the UK. The X99 chips are essentially Xeons with some bits turned off and overclocking enabled. They have vt-d enabled, amongst other things).