I booted DOS 7.1 (ie the DOS from Windows 98) on this i7-2600 with EFI. It only showed a max of 624KB base RAM (rather than the more normal 640KB) but aside from that it worked exactly as you'd expect.
People actually do that and worry about that stuff?
Funnily enough, electricity isn't free. If I were to leave this computer on 24/7, for example, it'd cost around £60 a year ($98) more than it currently does. It's not a King's ransom, but it's still enough cash to be more useful for something else (such as buying a couple of tanks of fuel for the car).
What was found, was that NTVDM included the processor functionality from Insignia's SoftPC.
It still does, even on Intel systems. If you dig inside NTVDM.EXE, even under Windows 8, you'll see the following string:
"SoftPC-AT Version 3 (C) Insignia Solutions Inc. 1987-1992"
It emulates a BIOS amongst other things. There's no reason why MS couldn't have produced a more up-to-date, just-as-transparent layer for x64, but that would have involved writing something new rather than tweaking code they bought 20 years ago when NT 3.1 was under development. I guess they decided the effort simply wasn't worth it, and being that they now had Virtual PC they decided it'd be better to just boot an entire copy of Windows rather than just virtualise MS-DOS 5 (as NTVDM does).
There is no such thing as a perfect OPL2/3 emulator, especially not the one in DOSBox (which introduces odd jarring notes in Wolf, for example). That's why I've kept two machines going for old DOS games: a 486DX4/100 laptop (with ESS built in - uses OPL3) and a Pentium 3 450 with an AWE64. Between them, they can play practically any DOS game I care to throw at them and - using my old Iiyama Vision Master Pro monitor the experience is pretty much exactly as it was 12 years ago.
I've got Windows 95 on the laptop and a 98SE / Windows 2000 dual boot on the desktop - exactly the same installs as I had when I retired that machine as my main computer. The 98SE install boots into DOS 7.1 by default and has 624KB of free base RAM. I used to enjoy juggling the order that drivers were loaded high to try and squeeze out a few extra KB of RAM!
Thanks for the detailed reply! I/O isn't a bottleneck as I've copied the files to a hard drive for transcoding - so it looks like it's the thread swapping that's limiting things. It just seemed a little unusual, as I was used to my old Core2 Duo machine reaching 100% usage on a single core when running the same programs (one at a time!) We've just got some new i3 machines at work, onto which we're loading Windows XP. It's interesting to see that XP treats the hyperthreaded cores the same as the real cores, spreading the load evenly, whereas Windows 7 avoids using the hyperthreaded cores unless it has to.
I've not noticed any slowdowns for browsing or even watching the AVIs I've transcoded earlier while all the decoding and re-encoding is going on - the only time I've managed to bring things to a juddering halt was when I ran 8 threads on HyperPi - a stupid mistake as it made the system utterly unresponsive.
I daresay the experience would be similar on a modern AMD-based system, it seems we've finally reached a point where it's not as easy to fully load a CPU as it once was!
An observation regarding DVD ripping (of stuff recorded from TV, so not encrypted) on a Sandy Bridge i7 under Windows 7 - if you use DVDx, it'll use the four real cores, but only at around 20 to 25% usage on each. If you then fire up VirtualDub to re-encode the files being spat out by DVDx, the four real cores will go to ~65% usage and one of the hyperthreaded cores will go up to around 40%. At no time does any core even reach 100% usage.
Conclusion? There's another bottleneck somewhere...
NB - I use 1 GB RAM buffer for DVDx, so it's not a disk access speed issue.
Apple gets to see hardware and processors etc months before the general public does. That means by the time we get our hands on the new stuff they've already "qualified" it for moths. It was odd that they sat on their thumbs for so long this time.
Great news for those wanting to install Snow Leopard on their Sandy Bridge machines. It was imperfect early on (involving setting busratio flags amongst others) but now that MacOS is officially supported on the 2nd generation Cores it should make for a smoother Hackintosh experience.
Mind you, the fact it's taken Apple four months to catch up isn't impressive. If hobbyists could run it on day one of the new chips being released, I don't see why Apple couldn't have prepared for it sooner...
The technology is nothing new, of course (I still have a Pentium3 PC from 1999, set up with a GeForce2 GTS (purchased in 2000), 120Hz 17" CRT and tethered, active 3D glasses). Exactly the same technology as used today was available over a decade ago, it's just that it was quite expensive and back then it didn't take off. I still remember playing Quake 2 and Black and White using that 3D setup and yes - it was very impressive.
11 years on and I have a 3DS. I've taken pictures of wolves at a wildlife centre with it and the 3D effects really work. They also work on that same old PC, which I fired up for testing. I've taken the 3DS into work and yes, most people can see the 3D effect (and seem quite impressed by it too).
It's not a scam at all, it really works and - over a decade since it appeared for PCs - it seems to have caught the attention of the mainstream rather than nerds like me with a fancy graphics card. I'm sure the author of that article will have a great time sulking while the rest of the world enjoys the 3D bonanza we're currently experiencing.
Yet more broadband out of reach of pretty much everyone. I'd find it far more impressive if Virgin were to, you know, actually expand their current cable coverage....
Fat chance of that happening though. I'd say it's about as likely as BT bringing faster-than-ADSL1 speed Internet access to the majority of rural parts of the UK this decade.
Bah, typos - that's what you get for typing away excitedly and not checking more thoroughly! It'll be interesting to see what becomes of this whole plan, anyway.
Utter pie in the sky, sadly. £2bn isn't anywhere near enough to bring fibre across the countryside of England, let alone Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland as well.
I'm lucky. I have a 7Mbps ADSL line despite living in the middle of nowhere, simply because I had ISDN installed in the late 90s. BT had to run ne cabling along the poles outside just for me (at their expensive); as a result everyone else around here has a 2 or 3 meg line at best. Elsewhere in southern England, for example in a village a few miles from Reading, you're lucky to get a 1Mbps connection.
ADSL2 may go some way to bringing faster broadband, but that's years behind schedule and I doubt it'll get here until 2020 at the earliest (by which time my 7Mbps line will look quite pathetic).
FTT(rural)H sounds great, but who'll pay for it? BT, being cheesed off, will charge exorbitant prices for the use of their poles and ducts, and it just isn't economically worthwhile to lay 10 miles of fibre cable to serve a couple of hundred people.
I suspect at best this proposal will lead to fibre reaching the outskirts of towns and cities, areas that already have ADSL2, while the majority of the rural population will see absolutely nothing from this - in the same way that large parts of rural England are without 3G phone service, or even a 2Mbps ADSL line.
Hopefully I'll be proved wrong, but as far as I can see there simply isn't the cash available to achieve the aims.
Well, the Palm Pilots couldn't do object embedding and weren't phones. If you're going to go that route, then Psion Series 3 in 1991 had OPL (with a PDA form-factor) and before that the Organiser II from 1986 was the first Psion device to have OPL available - long before Palm was even thought of.
Wow, we're catching up with what Symbian could do in 1998 (Symbian devices came with OPL, a BASIC-like language which you could code with on the device itself. Indeed, there was a booming Shareware market as people wrote their own games and utilities etc). OPL made it onto phones with the Nokia Communicator running SymbianOS 6.
Maybe next we'll have a story about being able to embed objects in the build-in word processor and spreadsheet, for example embedding a chart which can be edited OLE-like in situ just by double-tapping it...
It's depressing to see how Nokia threw all that away and dumbed-down Symbian. One step forwards and five steps backwards....
There are places that sell 625-line to 405-line converters online - so yes, in areas that still have analogue TV (including London) it'd be possible to receive over-the-air broadcasts on that set. Heck, get an oldish DTT box with an RF-out and you could daisy-chain that via a converter to watch modern digital terrestrial TV on it.
Not that you'd really want to, of course, but it could be done!
What a load of rubbish. The Oxford English Dictionary actually says this about LOL:
Pronunciation: Brit./ll/ ,/ll/ , U.S./lol/ ,/ll/
Forms: 19– LOL, 19– lol.
Etymology: Initialism
The first L of LOL is sometimes also explained as the initial letter of laugh.
(Show Less)
colloq.
A. int.
Categories
Originally and chiefly in the language of electronic communications: ‘ha ha!’; used to draw attention to a joke or humorous statement, or to express amusement.
1990 Jargon File Draft, part 4 of 4 in comp.misc (Usenet newsgroup) 13 June, LOLlaughing out loud.
1993 Re: Walking out of Movies in bit.listserv.cinema-l (Usenet newsgroup) 3 Aug., LOL. Damn, that's even worse. Ba Ha Ha Ha ha ha!
2002 What Mobile Apr. 23/3 (heading) Wan2 go on a d8 2nite? LOL. Everyone flirts, but will people really do it on their mobiles?
2003 K. Sampson Freshers 100 ‘Wow, man! Are you, like, really from a council estate?’ ‘Yep.’ ‘Lol! Awesome.’
2006 J. Dibbell Play Money xxiv. 170 There was a pause, then finally: lol. i know what ur hintin at.
Hmm, the reason it looks relatively dull is because it was taken in early to mid-March, when the Sun would be only around 35 degrees in altitude (at noon). The same shot in mid-summer (when the sun reaches the high 50s in altitude over Ireland) would look much more vivid.
That's scary, as that's exactly the machine I was thinking of, even the same magazine article too! I hadn't realised it was that long ago though, how time flies...
I can't stand trackpads (of any nature), they feel unnatural and clunky to me. Things such as a precision drag and drop across the desktop seem almost impossible for me and no, I don't have massive chunky fingers! It's a pity that the other two methods of control on a laptop (Trackpoint and trackball) seem to have fallen out of favour, with the notable exception of Lenovo (which owes that to its IBM heritage of course). I did once see a review of a laptop which had a mini-mouse pop out on a stalk, but that wouldn't have been very comfortable to use.
The thought of using a trackpad out of choice on a desktop (even if it's a fancy virtual trackpad) is a turn-off to me. I'll be keeping my Microsoft mouse, thank you! (I just wish you could still buy the original Intellimouse Explorer, that was the most comfortable mouse I've ever used....)
We invented those in the UK 20 years ago, they've called Non-value Indicator stamps and they're responsible for the end of seeing different stamps on letters every month: these days it's just a generic "2nd" and the Queen's head.
I too use maximised applications most of the time on my 24" 1920x1080 monitor - partly due to force of habit (it was a must back in the 640x480 days) and partly because even with that high resolution runing two applications side-by-side makes things feel a bit cramped, as well as looking weird. I'm used to windows being wider than they are tall, as I suspect are many folks.
There are times when it's beneficial to have two things open and visible at the same time, but not very often for me. Alt-tab is second nature and I prefer it for flicking between say a code window and a webpage. It may not be the most efficient way of using a windowing system but it works well for me.
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I booted DOS 7.1 (ie the DOS from Windows 98) on this i7-2600 with EFI. It only showed a max of 624KB base RAM (rather than the more normal 640KB) but aside from that it worked exactly as you'd expect.
Funnily enough, electricity isn't free. If I were to leave this computer on 24/7, for example, it'd cost around £60 a year ($98) more than it currently does. It's not a King's ransom, but it's still enough cash to be more useful for something else (such as buying a couple of tanks of fuel for the car).
It still does, even on Intel systems. If you dig inside NTVDM.EXE, even under Windows 8, you'll see the following string:
"SoftPC-AT Version 3 (C) Insignia Solutions Inc. 1987-1992"
It emulates a BIOS amongst other things. There's no reason why MS couldn't have produced a more up-to-date, just-as-transparent layer for x64, but that would have involved writing something new rather than tweaking code they bought 20 years ago when NT 3.1 was under development. I guess they decided the effort simply wasn't worth it, and being that they now had Virtual PC they decided it'd be better to just boot an entire copy of Windows rather than just virtualise MS-DOS 5 (as NTVDM does).
There is no such thing as a perfect OPL2/3 emulator, especially not the one in DOSBox (which introduces odd jarring notes in Wolf, for example). That's why I've kept two machines going for old DOS games: a 486DX4/100 laptop (with ESS built in - uses OPL3) and a Pentium 3 450 with an AWE64. Between them, they can play practically any DOS game I care to throw at them and - using my old Iiyama Vision Master Pro monitor the experience is pretty much exactly as it was 12 years ago.
I've got Windows 95 on the laptop and a 98SE / Windows 2000 dual boot on the desktop - exactly the same installs as I had when I retired that machine as my main computer. The 98SE install boots into DOS 7.1 by default and has 624KB of free base RAM. I used to enjoy juggling the order that drivers were loaded high to try and squeeze out a few extra KB of RAM!
If ever there was a way to get information out and about, trying to gag Twitter and Facebook is it! And once it's leaked, it's out there forever.
Thanks for the detailed reply! I/O isn't a bottleneck as I've copied the files to a hard drive for transcoding - so it looks like it's the thread swapping that's limiting things. It just seemed a little unusual, as I was used to my old Core2 Duo machine reaching 100% usage on a single core when running the same programs (one at a time!) We've just got some new i3 machines at work, onto which we're loading Windows XP. It's interesting to see that XP treats the hyperthreaded cores the same as the real cores, spreading the load evenly, whereas Windows 7 avoids using the hyperthreaded cores unless it has to.
I've not noticed any slowdowns for browsing or even watching the AVIs I've transcoded earlier while all the decoding and re-encoding is going on - the only time I've managed to bring things to a juddering halt was when I ran 8 threads on HyperPi - a stupid mistake as it made the system utterly unresponsive.
I daresay the experience would be similar on a modern AMD-based system, it seems we've finally reached a point where it's not as easy to fully load a CPU as it once was!
An observation regarding DVD ripping (of stuff recorded from TV, so not encrypted) on a Sandy Bridge i7 under Windows 7 - if you use DVDx, it'll use the four real cores, but only at around 20 to 25% usage on each. If you then fire up VirtualDub to re-encode the files being spat out by DVDx, the four real cores will go to ~65% usage and one of the hyperthreaded cores will go up to around 40%. At no time does any core even reach 100% usage.
Conclusion? There's another bottleneck somewhere...
NB - I use 1 GB RAM buffer for DVDx, so it's not a disk access speed issue.
Apple gets to see hardware and processors etc months before the general public does. That means by the time we get our hands on the new stuff they've already "qualified" it for moths. It was odd that they sat on their thumbs for so long this time.
Great news for those wanting to install Snow Leopard on their Sandy Bridge machines. It was imperfect early on (involving setting busratio flags amongst others) but now that MacOS is officially supported on the 2nd generation Cores it should make for a smoother Hackintosh experience.
Mind you, the fact it's taken Apple four months to catch up isn't impressive. If hobbyists could run it on day one of the new chips being released, I don't see why Apple couldn't have prepared for it sooner...
Well, the way you'd do that efficiently is to right click in the table, then click insert. That's the way it's been for years!
I'm in the UK and tip the barber. It's not an uncommon thing to do, I've seen plenty of others do it too.
LOL at that rant.
The technology is nothing new, of course (I still have a Pentium3 PC from 1999, set up with a GeForce2 GTS (purchased in 2000), 120Hz 17" CRT and tethered, active 3D glasses). Exactly the same technology as used today was available over a decade ago, it's just that it was quite expensive and back then it didn't take off. I still remember playing Quake 2 and Black and White using that 3D setup and yes - it was very impressive.
11 years on and I have a 3DS. I've taken pictures of wolves at a wildlife centre with it and the 3D effects really work. They also work on that same old PC, which I fired up for testing. I've taken the 3DS into work and yes, most people can see the 3D effect (and seem quite impressed by it too).
It's not a scam at all, it really works and - over a decade since it appeared for PCs - it seems to have caught the attention of the mainstream rather than nerds like me with a fancy graphics card. I'm sure the author of that article will have a great time sulking while the rest of the world enjoys the 3D bonanza we're currently experiencing.
Yet more broadband out of reach of pretty much everyone. I'd find it far more impressive if Virgin were to, you know, actually expand their current cable coverage....
Fat chance of that happening though. I'd say it's about as likely as BT bringing faster-than-ADSL1 speed Internet access to the majority of rural parts of the UK this decade.
Bah, typos - that's what you get for typing away excitedly and not checking more thoroughly! It'll be interesting to see what becomes of this whole plan, anyway.
Utter pie in the sky, sadly. £2bn isn't anywhere near enough to bring fibre across the countryside of England, let alone Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland as well.
I'm lucky. I have a 7Mbps ADSL line despite living in the middle of nowhere, simply because I had ISDN installed in the late 90s. BT had to run ne cabling along the poles outside just for me (at their expensive); as a result everyone else around here has a 2 or 3 meg line at best. Elsewhere in southern England, for example in a village a few miles from Reading, you're lucky to get a 1Mbps connection.
ADSL2 may go some way to bringing faster broadband, but that's years behind schedule and I doubt it'll get here until 2020 at the earliest (by which time my 7Mbps line will look quite pathetic).
FTT(rural)H sounds great, but who'll pay for it? BT, being cheesed off, will charge exorbitant prices for the use of their poles and ducts, and it just isn't economically worthwhile to lay 10 miles of fibre cable to serve a couple of hundred people.
I suspect at best this proposal will lead to fibre reaching the outskirts of towns and cities, areas that already have ADSL2, while the majority of the rural population will see absolutely nothing from this - in the same way that large parts of rural England are without 3G phone service, or even a 2Mbps ADSL line.
Hopefully I'll be proved wrong, but as far as I can see there simply isn't the cash available to achieve the aims.
Well, the Palm Pilots couldn't do object embedding and weren't phones. If you're going to go that route, then Psion Series 3 in 1991 had OPL (with a PDA form-factor) and before that the Organiser II from 1986 was the first Psion device to have OPL available - long before Palm was even thought of.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Psion_Organiser
Wow, we're catching up with what Symbian could do in 1998 (Symbian devices came with OPL, a BASIC-like language which you could code with on the device itself. Indeed, there was a booming Shareware market as people wrote their own games and utilities etc). OPL made it onto phones with the Nokia Communicator running SymbianOS 6.
Maybe next we'll have a story about being able to embed objects in the build-in word processor and spreadsheet, for example embedding a chart which can be edited OLE-like in situ just by double-tapping it...
It's depressing to see how Nokia threw all that away and dumbed-down Symbian. One step forwards and five steps backwards....
How long before we see some hacked firmware for normal routers, I wonder?
There are places that sell 625-line to 405-line converters online - so yes, in areas that still have analogue TV (including London) it'd be possible to receive over-the-air broadcasts on that set. Heck, get an oldish DTT box with an RF-out and you could daisy-chain that via a converter to watch modern digital terrestrial TV on it.
Not that you'd really want to, of course, but it could be done!
What a load of rubbish. The Oxford English Dictionary actually says this about LOL: /ll/ , /ll/ , U.S. /lol/ , /ll/
Pronunciation: Brit.
Forms: 19– LOL, 19– lol.
Etymology: Initialism
The first L of LOL is sometimes also explained as the initial letter of laugh.
(Show Less)
colloq.
A. int.
Categories
Originally and chiefly in the language of electronic communications: ‘ha ha!’; used to draw attention to a joke or humorous statement, or to express amusement.
1990 Jargon File Draft, part 4 of 4 in comp.misc (Usenet newsgroup) 13 June, LOLlaughing out loud.
1993 Re: Walking out of Movies in bit.listserv.cinema-l (Usenet newsgroup) 3 Aug., LOL. Damn, that's even worse. Ba Ha Ha Ha ha ha!
2002 What Mobile Apr. 23/3 (heading) Wan2 go on a d8 2nite? LOL. Everyone flirts, but will people really do it on their mobiles?
2003 K. Sampson Freshers 100 ‘Wow, man! Are you, like, really from a council estate?’ ‘Yep.’ ‘Lol! Awesome.’
2006 J. Dibbell Play Money xxiv. 170 There was a pause, then finally: lol. i know what ur hintin at.
Source: http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/291168?rskey=SR4Uoy&result=2&isAdvanced=false#eid
Hmm, the reason it looks relatively dull is because it was taken in early to mid-March, when the Sun would be only around 35 degrees in altitude (at noon). The same shot in mid-summer (when the sun reaches the high 50s in altitude over Ireland) would look much more vivid.
That's scary, as that's exactly the machine I was thinking of, even the same magazine article too! I hadn't realised it was that long ago though, how time flies...
I can't stand trackpads (of any nature), they feel unnatural and clunky to me. Things such as a precision drag and drop across the desktop seem almost impossible for me and no, I don't have massive chunky fingers! It's a pity that the other two methods of control on a laptop (Trackpoint and trackball) seem to have fallen out of favour, with the notable exception of Lenovo (which owes that to its IBM heritage of course). I did once see a review of a laptop which had a mini-mouse pop out on a stalk, but that wouldn't have been very comfortable to use.
The thought of using a trackpad out of choice on a desktop (even if it's a fancy virtual trackpad) is a turn-off to me. I'll be keeping my Microsoft mouse, thank you! (I just wish you could still buy the original Intellimouse Explorer, that was the most comfortable mouse I've ever used....)
We invented those in the UK 20 years ago, they've called Non-value Indicator stamps and they're responsible for the end of seeing different stamps on letters every month: these days it's just a generic "2nd" and the Queen's head.
I too use maximised applications most of the time on my 24" 1920x1080 monitor - partly due to force of habit (it was a must back in the 640x480 days) and partly because even with that high resolution runing two applications side-by-side makes things feel a bit cramped, as well as looking weird. I'm used to windows being wider than they are tall, as I suspect are many folks.
There are times when it's beneficial to have two things open and visible at the same time, but not very often for me. Alt-tab is second nature and I prefer it for flicking between say a code window and a webpage. It may not be the most efficient way of using a windowing system but it works well for me.