Prediction: "The wireless networks of the future will be faster, but unless there is a major breakthrough, wired networks will have a far greater bandwidth. Mobile devices will be able to send and receive messages, but it will be expensive and unusual to use them to receive an individual video stream."
The article seems to miss the bit that says mobile devices in that quote, seeming instead to infer the quote was about networks inside a house rather than across the country.
Maybe America's different, but over here in the UK I can't say I've seen anybody actually use a mobile phone to download videos (other than the odd "look at this!" clip). It's simply too slow and/or expensive. Even those who have iPhones seem to restrict themselves to the odd app and general browsing.
As for Internet bandwidth, my choices here in the countryside are: ADSL, 7.15Mbps, wireless broadband, 2Mbps, 2G mobile phone, ~56kbps. My wired home network runs at a nominal 100Mbps and is much faster than the wireless signals I get from my router - I only get ~30% signal strength at the other end of the house from the router. Maybe it's all the lead-based paint!
What's left on Usenet is the "dark allies" of porn, spamming, and illegally shared copyrighted files.
And some useful discussion. For example, uk.sci.weather is an active newsgroup (I post in it daily, as do others) that's surprisingly free of spam. There are people on there who wouldn't dream of using Web-based forums.
That said, Usenet has been ignored by the masses for so long... most of my friends have never even heard of it. My ISP provides a free (non-binary) feed and I reckon the cost of that is pretty insignificant. It's only when binary groups are involved that bandwidth usage etc soars!
Some guy there's got a USB floppy drive connected to his hub "right now". Ooh, scary - I use those things daily at work, so it's not exactlty hoarding.
No, I can beat that. Not only do I have several large boxes full of 5.25" inch disks that I got off eBay for next to nothing, I've got a 5.25" drive in my Core2 Duo machine running Windows 7. It's the only floppy drive I've got connected to this machine and it's properly set up in the BIOS and everything. You know what, Windows 7 even has a nice 5.25" disk drive icon, even if it's reusing the one from Vista.
Yes, it's been done - albeit for the Commodore Plus/4, aka the Commodore 264.
http://plus4world.powweb.com/software/Fire_Ant
There's a WAV file there, recorded from a tape and yes, it works with certain emulators.
My location has overheard phone cables, so fast ADSL is not an optio
I've never heard of that one before - how odd! I live a mile outside the nearest village, which luckily has a small brick building containing the telephone exchange. I have overheard phone lines and overhead power lines too (commonplace in the countryside but not so common in towns for some reason).
I recently upgraded to an "ADSL max" connection, having been on a fixed 1Mbps ADSL link for the past 5 years. I synced at 8128kbps and have a 7.15Mbps IP profile - the connection's been rock-solid for the last week too.
Having phone line cables coming in via telegraph poles has nothing to do with your ADSL connection speeed.
Glacial? Well, the North Sea off NE England is around 6C at the moment but that's not what I'd call glacial. Last summer (not exactly a "scorcher") it reached 15C, the year before, 16C.
All of this ignores the obvious problem that the prevailing wind over the UK is a SW'ly - and thus the cooling from the sea won't really happen except in summer when sea breezes set in. Indeed, in the winter coastal areas are often warmer than inland. The recent easterlies and NE'lies over England recently have been pretty unusual, all caused by the jet stream being far to the south of usual (it's normally between Scotland and Iceland, but currently it's blasting over the Canaries and the Sahara!)
London's climate isn't particularly friendly this time of year.
It's been very mild and very wet of late; it's going to get closer to normal for the first week or so in December, after that is anyone's guess. By "very mild" I mean temperatures in the upper 50s (F), whereas they should be in the upper 40s at this time of year. London has a notable "urban heat island" effect and it's not uncommon for it to be a couple to a few degrees warmer than surrounding areas. Snow is rare in London, especially so in December.
More notable will be the darkness: all of the lower 48 States are further south than the UK, thus there'll be less daylight than you're used to (unless you're Alaskan!) Sunset is currently around 4PM, sunrise is half seven in the morning. By late December sunset is around 3:50PM and sunrise isn't until after eight. Get a cloudy, wet day and it can really seem bleak.
It's actually vaguely worrying. The lack of solar activity (the recent boost won't do anything yet) and the flip to a generally negative PDO and the La Nina in recent years should all, on paper at least, have resulted in a strong cooling effect. Yet if we've only levelled off, it makes me wonder what happens when things inevitably flip back to a pattern that encourages warmth!
NOAA forecasts are not available to non-U.S. citizens (or if they are available, have no value way over in Europe).
Oh, but they are - and they have great value over here.
NOAA runs the GFS, the world's largest (and most complete) free weather model. It's not as good as ECMWF, the European equivalent, but as the data's available via FTP for free four times a day. There are a number of sites over here which prettify the data and charge people to access it. Metcheck and Netweather, for example, both have "premium" areas where you pay to access data that's available to anyone for free if you know how to decode GRIB files.
ECMWF, on the other hand, provides much less data for free, instead charging for all the good stuff (eg ensemble forecasts). It's annoying as ECMWF is funded by the European taxpayers! The UK's Met Office does the same, charging people for its data even though it's funded from taxation (and part of the UK's military budget at that). The Met Office even charges people who (voluntarily) submit their data in the event that they need to access it in the future...
I don't bother with any of those silly toolbars.
Google is (and has been) the default in Firefox for me, no attempts made by MS to change it either on this PC or the others I use during the course of an average week. That's on a mixture of XP and 7 as well, FWIW.
i wonder if dogs consider wolves to be adults, and thus automatically higher up the pack hierarchy?
Could well be! That said, I've seen all sorts of reactions from dogs to the wolves, so whatever they see wolves as it varies from dog to dog. It doesn't seem to be breed-specific either.
For what it's worth, wolves invariably seem to see dogs as pups, even fully mature dogs (which further backs up the theories about dogs "not growing up".) We walk our wolves, on leads, in woods a couple of times a week.* Once in a while we'll encounter dogs being taken for walks and the wolves are always dead keen to get to them! The wolves will whimper and wag their tails, just as they would to wolf pups. The Rottweiler incident was quite unusual, although the wolves were in a mobile enclosure rather than on a lead, away from "home".
As mentioned, wolves will change quite markedly around 3 years of age. If a wolf decides it doesn't respect you by then, you're unlikely to be able to handle them thereafter. Worse still, the lower-ranking wolves will be on the lookout for an opportunity to raise themselves up the ladder, which may involve the odd bit of "testing" or "bouncing" (directed at a handler, rather than anyone else). A dog, once shown its place in the pack, will generally accept it and stay there.
* - and what with all the health and safety rules these days in the UK, you can imagine the paperwork needed to do that! Strangely though by law the wolves don't need to be muzzled in public, unlike say a pitbull.
any idea where I can get some wolves fur to see the reaction of my dog?
As you're in the UK, that's easier said than done. Wolf fur comes under CITIES legislation, which means it's technically illegal to send any without both parties owning CITIES certificates. Our wolves are registered under CITIES, but when I got some fur sent to me over a decade ago they weren't.
I'm sure on the internet you can get a wolf pelt, but perhaps the treatment of it will remove some of the effect?
Yes - almost certainly, it'd lose most of its wolfy smell. The soft clumps of fur that us volunteers take home smell "wolfy" for a couple to a few days, then lose the smell. I daresay a dog would be able to pick up the scent for longer.
The exception to that was when I asked the wolf centre to post some fur to me just after I adopted a wolf. To my surprise (and delight) I ended up with a massive padded envelope full of the stuff - and by gum it reeked. I think the oils in it must have gone rancid, or something! I still have a small piece of that fur in the keyring I use for my housekeys. It doesn't smell any more, needless to say.
Maybe a more interesting idea is to get some of the wolf urine they use to keep animals away from plants.
That'd be almost impossible here in the UK - and I see Twinbee is in the UK too. I'd imagine customs wouldn't be very impressed if one tried to import wolf pee from the States!
(And no, I'm not going to follow our wolves around with a plastic bottle, before anyone thinks of that!)
I'm lucky enough to volunteer at a wolf centre in southern England. At this time of year they're moulting like crazy and it's easy to pull of clumps of underfur from them.
The fun starts if you give some to a dog owner and ask them to show it to their dogs.
The last time I did that it made my friend's 4 dogs go nuts - one went very wide-eyed, another tried clambering over the guy to get it and the third begged for some. I've seen other reactions including frenzied barking and fear from other dogs.
So it seems that despite most dogs never getting to see a wolf (at least here in the UK, we shot our last wolf in the late 1700s), they still know full well what one is.
As an aside, dogs are amazingly different from wolves despite being 99.8% the same DNA wise. Only one season a year and permanent puppyhood - domestic dogs don't become adults, we've bred that out of them somehow. Wolves, on the other hand, change noticeably around 3 years of age. Dogs are also much, much better at picking up signals from people - and unlike wolves, they're always eager to please if bought up properly. A wolf'll only do something if it feels like it, or if it'll get something out of it!
And an amusing anecdote to finish - we used to take our wolves out to county shows, as they're socialied and enjoyed meeting people. One morning at the Kent show we let the wolves into their mobile enclosure and they watched intently as some Rottweilers came over, along with their (big-mouthed) owners. The blokes were going on about how their dogs could "have" our wolves easily, yet both dogs cowered away when Duma, one of our soppier wolves with people, casually gazed at them, raised her lip soundlessly, showing impressive fangs. Those Rottweilers knew better than to come any closer, much to the chagrin of their owners!
Very few times have I personally witnessed such a big leap forward in a technology.
The Voodoo Graphics (as it was called), in the shape of an Orchid Righteous 3D, completely wowed my friends and I.
At the time I was in a small study bedroom at university, with a battered old P100 as my PC. Quake 2 frankly chugged on it, looking pretty dreary with its drab greys and browns at a resolution of 320x200 (at between 15 and 25 fps).
I inserted this £70 wonder-card and bam, the same game now had smooth textures and coloured lighting! Moreover, it now ran at 640x480 at an effortless 35 frames per second.
Frankly, it was unbelieveably good. And yes, as alluded to by another poster.... "CLICK"!
I'm probably one of only a handful of people who has a dual-boot Windows 7 / DOS 7.1 config on my Core2 Duo PC. Basic DOS works fine, but if you use EMM386 it crashes soon after, probably because DOS was not designed to use 4GB of RAM!
PC Plus magazine used to invite readers to write in with code snippets for DEBUG in the early 90s - I remember one program which was only a handful of bytes allowed you to change the border of the screen in text mode, so that you could have a nice blue border for example. I never did figure out how that worked, as that was outside of the normal 80x25 area!
I seem to remember DEBUG spat out COM files rather than EXEs, as the a100 bit was where COM files executed when run, or something!
Yup - a fun fact is you can run the pre-PC, pre-Microsoft DEBUG.COM from April 1981 in a DOS box under Windows 7 without any problems - it just works.
Grab a copy from http://86dos.org/ if you fancy seeing history in action!
(The Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista/7 version of DEBUG.EXE is taken from DOS 5. If you dig in the executable you'll see the words "MS DOS Version 5.00 (C)Copyright 1981-1991 Microsoft Corp Licensed Material - Property of Microsoft ")
Anyway, the article is Slashdotted so I can't read it. DEBUG survives in this copy of Windows 7 that I'm using, but admittedly it's the beta rather than RC version. I'd be amazed if MS have deleted it (along with the other 16-bit apps) though; I suspect the articles just catching up with 6 years ago... none of the x64 versions of Windows have the NT Virtual DOS Machine or the 16-bit tools included.
This is an utter waste of cash and a useless idea.
I work at a school which decided to hand out EEEPCs to all children in a certain year-group, which consisted of 15 and 16 year olds.
Bear in mind these devices run a version of Xandros Linux and (after a few security tweaks) provided wireless Internet access across the school, as well as OpenOffice and a few utilities.
I'd say of the couple of hundred given out, we've had around 40 break, another 40 which we've managed to repair, 40 or so PSUs blow up and another 10 handed back as the kids didn't want them. Going around lessons shows that the children are invariably unimpressed with them and (sadly for Linux fans) one of the main complaints is that they're not running Windows. Indeed, the only really enthusiastic comments I've heard were when some of the kids saw me playing with XP on one!
Basically, the kids don't respect them and they treat them like a toy. The most able children try and install packages and break our security, but it's only a couple that do that. The majority simply don't care, they just chuck them in a corner of their school bag and forget about them.
The latest plan is to keep the EEEPCs that remain in the classrooms, such that the kids use them during lessons then hand them in at the end. So far this plan works a thousand times better - the kids still don't like them, but at least they're not smashing them up or chucking them downstairs, or hitting each other's bags whilst the PCs are inside.
I was 16 when DN3D came out (I managed to get around the 18-rating for it by asking my grandmother to buy it for me - poor old dear didn't know what the game was about!)
Unlike you, however, I've been following developments since then closely. Truth be told I didn't expect to ever play it, although the hundreds (if not thousands) of posters on the 3D Realms boards had different expectations!
The one I feel most sorry for is Joe Siegler. Through the years he's campaigned hard and helped release many of the old Apogee games as freeware and he was always posting on the forums, with all sorts of interesting insights and bits and pieces. He was also oft seen posting about how the bosses had no interest at all in their back catalogue (except making money from it!) - it was a one-man battle to get things like Bio Menace and Kroz released as freeware.
The really sad thing is, Apogee / 3DR could have kept going easily enough - witness the so-called "casual game" explosion. If only they'd had the foresight to publish things like World of Goo, Peggle, Zuma etc... The really annoying thing is, that's how they started! Back when games were simple, when a team of 6 could produce something amazing.
But no, it seems that they'd rather just concentrate on the great white elephant that was Duke Nukem Forever. And no matter how good a game that would be, talking about the future doesn't generate cashflow. It's Osbourne computers all over again!
Microsoft would seem to agree with you - that's why NTVDM (the DOS Virtual Machine) in 32-bit NT all the way to Windows 7 is based on it.
COMMAND/C VER from a command prompt will show the internal version number.
I read in a magazine (PC Plus) when XP came out that DOS 5 was used as MS didn't add anything worthwhile beyond it! How true that is, I couldn't say...
Slashdot Mirror
The article seems to miss the bit that says mobile devices in that quote, seeming instead to infer the quote was about networks inside a house rather than across the country.
Maybe America's different, but over here in the UK I can't say I've seen anybody actually use a mobile phone to download videos (other than the odd "look at this!" clip). It's simply too slow and/or expensive. Even those who have iPhones seem to restrict themselves to the odd app and general browsing.
As for Internet bandwidth, my choices here in the countryside are: ADSL, 7.15Mbps, wireless broadband, 2Mbps, 2G mobile phone, ~56kbps. My wired home network runs at a nominal 100Mbps and is much faster than the wireless signals I get from my router - I only get ~30% signal strength at the other end of the house from the router. Maybe it's all the lead-based paint!
My PC's pretty modern (a year old) and it has one:
http://i41.tinypic.com/24mt7ic.jpg
Note the shiny icon Windows 7 applies to it!
Sadly for me the BIOS only supports one floppy drive for some reason. As I don't have a 5.25" USB floppy drive - it has to be that one.
And some useful discussion. For example, uk.sci.weather is an active newsgroup (I post in it daily, as do others) that's surprisingly free of spam. There are people on there who wouldn't dream of using Web-based forums.
That said, Usenet has been ignored by the masses for so long... most of my friends have never even heard of it. My ISP provides a free (non-binary) feed and I reckon the cost of that is pretty insignificant. It's only when binary groups are involved that bandwidth usage etc soars!
No, I can beat that. Not only do I have several large boxes full of 5.25" inch disks that I got off eBay for next to nothing, I've got a 5.25" drive in my Core2 Duo machine running Windows 7. It's the only floppy drive I've got connected to this machine and it's properly set up in the BIOS and everything. You know what, Windows 7 even has a nice 5.25" disk drive icon, even if it's reusing the one from Vista.
Yes, it's been done - albeit for the Commodore Plus/4, aka the Commodore 264.
http://plus4world.powweb.com/software/Fire_Ant
There's a WAV file there, recorded from a tape and yes, it works with certain emulators.
I've never heard of that one before - how odd! I live a mile outside the nearest village, which luckily has a small brick building containing the telephone exchange. I have overheard phone lines and overhead power lines too (commonplace in the countryside but not so common in towns for some reason).
I recently upgraded to an "ADSL max" connection, having been on a fixed 1Mbps ADSL link for the past 5 years. I synced at 8128kbps and have a 7.15Mbps IP profile - the connection's been rock-solid for the last week too.
Having phone line cables coming in via telegraph poles has nothing to do with your ADSL connection speeed.
Glacial? Well, the North Sea off NE England is around 6C at the moment but that's not what I'd call glacial. Last summer (not exactly a "scorcher") it reached 15C, the year before, 16C.
All of this ignores the obvious problem that the prevailing wind over the UK is a SW'ly - and thus the cooling from the sea won't really happen except in summer when sea breezes set in. Indeed, in the winter coastal areas are often warmer than inland. The recent easterlies and NE'lies over England recently have been pretty unusual, all caused by the jet stream being far to the south of usual (it's normally between Scotland and Iceland, but currently it's blasting over the Canaries and the Sahara!)
It's been very mild and very wet of late; it's going to get closer to normal for the first week or so in December, after that is anyone's guess. By "very mild" I mean temperatures in the upper 50s (F), whereas they should be in the upper 40s at this time of year. London has a notable "urban heat island" effect and it's not uncommon for it to be a couple to a few degrees warmer than surrounding areas. Snow is rare in London, especially so in December.
More notable will be the darkness: all of the lower 48 States are further south than the UK, thus there'll be less daylight than you're used to (unless you're Alaskan!) Sunset is currently around 4PM, sunrise is half seven in the morning. By late December sunset is around 3:50PM and sunrise isn't until after eight. Get a cloudy, wet day and it can really seem bleak.
www.google.com/ncr will do the trick.
As far as I know, yes - my 3 phone can only manage a 2G connection at home, albeit in the middle of nowhere.
Whatsmyip reports nat70.mia.three.co.uk when I go online, so 3 is still involved for Web access even in a 2G area.
A decade of cooling? Whichever decade that is, it's certainly not the 2000s!
The decadal trend is pretty much flat, perhaps slightly upwards but at a very slight rate of change overall.
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/anomalies/monthly.land_ocean.90S.90N.df_1901-2000mean.dat NOAA has all the data if you fancy plotting it youself.
It's actually vaguely worrying. The lack of solar activity (the recent boost won't do anything yet) and the flip to a generally negative PDO and the La Nina in recent years should all, on paper at least, have resulted in a strong cooling effect. Yet if we've only levelled off, it makes me wonder what happens when things inevitably flip back to a pattern that encourages warmth!
Oh, but they are - and they have great value over here.
NOAA runs the GFS, the world's largest (and most complete) free weather model. It's not as good as ECMWF, the European equivalent, but as the data's available via FTP for free four times a day. There are a number of sites over here which prettify the data and charge people to access it. Metcheck and Netweather, for example, both have "premium" areas where you pay to access data that's available to anyone for free if you know how to decode GRIB files.
ECMWF, on the other hand, provides much less data for free, instead charging for all the good stuff (eg ensemble forecasts). It's annoying as ECMWF is funded by the European taxpayers! The UK's Met Office does the same, charging people for its data even though it's funded from taxation (and part of the UK's military budget at that). The Met Office even charges people who (voluntarily) submit their data in the event that they need to access it in the future...
I don't bother with any of those silly toolbars.
Google is (and has been) the default in Firefox for me, no attempts made by MS to change it either on this PC or the others I use during the course of an average week. That's on a mixture of XP and 7 as well, FWIW.
No, it went on paying off the national debt.
A great move IMO, but one which economists got in a tizz about for some reason.
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/internet/0,1000000097,2086122,00.htm
Could well be! That said, I've seen all sorts of reactions from dogs to the wolves, so whatever they see wolves as it varies from dog to dog. It doesn't seem to be breed-specific either.
For what it's worth, wolves invariably seem to see dogs as pups, even fully mature dogs (which further backs up the theories about dogs "not growing up".) We walk our wolves, on leads, in woods a couple of times a week.* Once in a while we'll encounter dogs being taken for walks and the wolves are always dead keen to get to them! The wolves will whimper and wag their tails, just as they would to wolf pups. The Rottweiler incident was quite unusual, although the wolves were in a mobile enclosure rather than on a lead, away from "home".
As mentioned, wolves will change quite markedly around 3 years of age. If a wolf decides it doesn't respect you by then, you're unlikely to be able to handle them thereafter. Worse still, the lower-ranking wolves will be on the lookout for an opportunity to raise themselves up the ladder, which may involve the odd bit of "testing" or "bouncing" (directed at a handler, rather than anyone else). A dog, once shown its place in the pack, will generally accept it and stay there.
* - and what with all the health and safety rules these days in the UK, you can imagine the paperwork needed to do that! Strangely though by law the wolves don't need to be muzzled in public, unlike say a pitbull.
As you're in the UK, that's easier said than done. Wolf fur comes under CITIES legislation, which means it's technically illegal to send any without both parties owning CITIES certificates. Our wolves are registered under CITIES, but when I got some fur sent to me over a decade ago they weren't.
Anyway, I'll see if anything can be done!
Yes - almost certainly, it'd lose most of its wolfy smell. The soft clumps of fur that us volunteers take home smell "wolfy" for a couple to a few days, then lose the smell. I daresay a dog would be able to pick up the scent for longer.
The exception to that was when I asked the wolf centre to post some fur to me just after I adopted a wolf. To my surprise (and delight) I ended up with a massive padded envelope full of the stuff - and by gum it reeked. I think the oils in it must have gone rancid, or something! I still have a small piece of that fur in the keyring I use for my housekeys. It doesn't smell any more, needless to say.
That'd be almost impossible here in the UK - and I see Twinbee is in the UK too. I'd imagine customs wouldn't be very impressed if one tried to import wolf pee from the States!
(And no, I'm not going to follow our wolves around with a plastic bottle, before anyone thinks of that!)
What's even funnier is that dogs know wolves.
I'm lucky enough to volunteer at a wolf centre in southern England. At this time of year they're moulting like crazy and it's easy to pull of clumps of underfur from them.
The fun starts if you give some to a dog owner and ask them to show it to their dogs.
The last time I did that it made my friend's 4 dogs go nuts - one went very wide-eyed, another tried clambering over the guy to get it and the third begged for some. I've seen other reactions including frenzied barking and fear from other dogs.
So it seems that despite most dogs never getting to see a wolf (at least here in the UK, we shot our last wolf in the late 1700s), they still know full well what one is.
As an aside, dogs are amazingly different from wolves despite being 99.8% the same DNA wise. Only one season a year and permanent puppyhood - domestic dogs don't become adults, we've bred that out of them somehow. Wolves, on the other hand, change noticeably around 3 years of age. Dogs are also much, much better at picking up signals from people - and unlike wolves, they're always eager to please if bought up properly. A wolf'll only do something if it feels like it, or if it'll get something out of it!
And an amusing anecdote to finish - we used to take our wolves out to county shows, as they're socialied and enjoyed meeting people. One morning at the Kent show we let the wolves into their mobile enclosure and they watched intently as some Rottweilers came over, along with their (big-mouthed) owners. The blokes were going on about how their dogs could "have" our wolves easily, yet both dogs cowered away when Duma, one of our soppier wolves with people, casually gazed at them, raised her lip soundlessly, showing impressive fangs. Those Rottweilers knew better than to come any closer, much to the chagrin of their owners!
The Voodoo Graphics (as it was called), in the shape of an Orchid Righteous 3D, completely wowed my friends and I.
At the time I was in a small study bedroom at university, with a battered old P100 as my PC. Quake 2 frankly chugged on it, looking pretty dreary with its drab greys and browns at a resolution of 320x200 (at between 15 and 25 fps).
I inserted this £70 wonder-card and bam, the same game now had smooth textures and coloured lighting! Moreover, it now ran at 640x480 at an effortless 35 frames per second.
Frankly, it was unbelieveably good. And yes, as alluded to by another poster.... "CLICK"!
I'm probably one of only a handful of people who has a dual-boot Windows 7 / DOS 7.1 config on my Core2 Duo PC. Basic DOS works fine, but if you use EMM386 it crashes soon after, probably because DOS was not designed to use 4GB of RAM!
I seem to remember DEBUG spat out COM files rather than EXEs, as the a100 bit was where COM files executed when run, or something!
Yup - a fun fact is you can run the pre-PC, pre-Microsoft DEBUG.COM from April 1981 in a DOS box under Windows 7 without any problems - it just works.
Grab a copy from http://86dos.org/ if you fancy seeing history in action!
(The Windows NT/2000/XP/Vista/7 version of DEBUG.EXE is taken from DOS 5. If you dig in the executable you'll see the words "MS DOS Version 5.00 (C)Copyright 1981-1991 Microsoft Corp Licensed Material - Property of Microsoft ")
Anyway, the article is Slashdotted so I can't read it. DEBUG survives in this copy of Windows 7 that I'm using, but admittedly it's the beta rather than RC version. I'd be amazed if MS have deleted it (along with the other 16-bit apps) though; I suspect the articles just catching up with 6 years ago... none of the x64 versions of Windows have the NT Virtual DOS Machine or the 16-bit tools included.
I work at a school which decided to hand out EEEPCs to all children in a certain year-group, which consisted of 15 and 16 year olds.
Bear in mind these devices run a version of Xandros Linux and (after a few security tweaks) provided wireless Internet access across the school, as well as OpenOffice and a few utilities.
I'd say of the couple of hundred given out, we've had around 40 break, another 40 which we've managed to repair, 40 or so PSUs blow up and another 10 handed back as the kids didn't want them. Going around lessons shows that the children are invariably unimpressed with them and (sadly for Linux fans) one of the main complaints is that they're not running Windows. Indeed, the only really enthusiastic comments I've heard were when some of the kids saw me playing with XP on one!
Basically, the kids don't respect them and they treat them like a toy. The most able children try and install packages and break our security, but it's only a couple that do that. The majority simply don't care, they just chuck them in a corner of their school bag and forget about them.
The latest plan is to keep the EEEPCs that remain in the classrooms, such that the kids use them during lessons then hand them in at the end. So far this plan works a thousand times better - the kids still don't like them, but at least they're not smashing them up or chucking them downstairs, or hitting each other's bags whilst the PCs are inside.
I was 16 when DN3D came out (I managed to get around the 18-rating for it by asking my grandmother to buy it for me - poor old dear didn't know what the game was about!)
Unlike you, however, I've been following developments since then closely. Truth be told I didn't expect to ever play it, although the hundreds (if not thousands) of posters on the 3D Realms boards had different expectations!
The one I feel most sorry for is Joe Siegler. Through the years he's campaigned hard and helped release many of the old Apogee games as freeware and he was always posting on the forums, with all sorts of interesting insights and bits and pieces. He was also oft seen posting about how the bosses had no interest at all in their back catalogue (except making money from it!) - it was a one-man battle to get things like Bio Menace and Kroz released as freeware.
The really sad thing is, Apogee / 3DR could have kept going easily enough - witness the so-called "casual game" explosion. If only they'd had the foresight to publish things like World of Goo, Peggle, Zuma etc... The really annoying thing is, that's how they started! Back when games were simple, when a team of 6 could produce something amazing.
But no, it seems that they'd rather just concentrate on the great white elephant that was Duke Nukem Forever. And no matter how good a game that would be, talking about the future doesn't generate cashflow. It's Osbourne computers all over again!
Microsoft would seem to agree with you - that's why NTVDM (the DOS Virtual Machine) in 32-bit NT all the way to Windows 7 is based on it. /C VER from a command prompt will show the internal version number.
COMMAND
I read in a magazine (PC Plus) when XP came out that DOS 5 was used as MS didn't add anything worthwhile beyond it! How true that is, I couldn't say...