NTVDM.EXE is NT's Virtual DOS Machine. From the Resource Kit:
"In Windows NT, each application written for MS-DOS runs in its own NTVDM process.
"Windows NT runs the application by using a NTVDM and VDDs. This process is called WOW, for Win16-on-Win32. Using a 16-bit NTVDM, Windows NT translates Windows 3.1-based application calls in Enhanced mode on all Intel-based and RISC-based computers.
"16-bit Windows applications also run in an NTVDM. An Intel 486 emulator in Windows NT enables16-bit Windows applications to run on RISC computers, too.
"Windows NT 4.0 runs 16-bit Windows applications as separate threads in a single NTVDM process with a shared address space. This differs from MS-DOS applications which each run in a separate NTVDM process. The Win16 NTVDM is also known as WOW (for Win16-on-Win32). The Win16 NTVDM can also run 16-bit applications On RISC processors, NTVDM emulates all Intel x86 instructions in addition to providing a virtual hardware environment.
"The Win16 NTVDM is a multithreaded process wherein each of the threads is a different 16-bit Windows application. This single process is multitasking - that is, on a multiprocessor computer, one of the 16-bit processes in the NTVDM can run at the same time as threads of other processes. However, only one 16-bit Windows application thread in an NTVDM can run at a time; all other threads of that NTVDM process are blocked. If a Win16 NTVDM thread is preempted (interrupted by a higher priority thread), the microkernel always resumes with the thread that was preempted.
"Every Win16 NTVDM includes two system threads: a Wowexec.exe thread which starts Win16 applications, and a heartbeat thread which simulates timer interrupts to the application. In addition, there is a thread for each Win16 application running in the process. Windows NT 4.0 includes an option to run a 16-bit Windows application in its own separate NTVDM process with its own address space. This allows 16-bit Windows applications to be fully preemptible and multitasking.
"The Windows NT 4.0 NTVDM provides stubs for Windows 3.1 dynamic-link libraries and drivers, and it automatically handles translation of 16-bit Windows APIs and messages." -- Cheers
... and would you like to suggest one of these ways? Remember the following constraints:
you have to deal with arbitrary floorplans
you need to be able to put numbers, names etc on the image underlying the imagemap
the zooming/scrolling has to be fast - if people have to reload a 400KB image each time they zoom or pan then they're not going to be very happy
This isn't a flame - I'd like to know how this is best done. I'd add that I'm by no stretch of the imagination an HTML guru, but I did investigate other sites offering similar facilities ("it's not plagiarism, it's research") and most of them seemed to be using either client-side Java applets or the SmartPictures plugin, rather than HTML, so I concluded that it was probably at the hard-to-impossible end of the market and therefore not something that should be embarked on given our (stupidly tight) timescales. -- Cheers
And what would you recommend instead - a browser which screenreads: "Stand 7 is 10 yards north and two aisles across from Stand 22"? While I'm all for accessability where it's an option, it's not really a goer in this case (where, for example, is the screen-reader version of Quake?) -- Cheers
I'm just finishing off writing an engine which builds.SWF files (Flash movie files, for the Lynx generation out there). This means that text-only browsers, people running graphical browsers which don't support the Flash Player, people on Palms or WAP phones or two-tin-cans-and-a-piece-of-string or whatever the fsck the last 0.1% of the population connect with won't be able to use some of the functionality.
The reason we're using Flash, however, is because it's the best option out there. The requirement was to deliver an interactive floorplan for trade-shows to the browser: it had to be zoomable, moveable, fast and respond to clicks. Given this, Flash seemed like the best option, especially since SVG support is currently nigh-on non-existent (actually, having said that, Adobe have released an SVG... plugin. Hmm).
Does anyone out there have any better suggestions? We didn't, so we decided to abandon the <5% of the market that weren't running Netscape 4+ or IE4+. Life's tough, I'm afraid (c.f. the move in the UK from 405 line TV signals to 625 line - eventually, you've got to abandon some people). -- Cheers
Well, the tech. preview for IPv6 under W2K is available here: presumably the 9x series and NT4 will both be patchable (it's no more than a new WinSock i.e a new TCP/IP stack). It's also, AFAIK, in the 2.3 and 2.4 kernel series. -- Cheers
Because it's not for my pleasure, you moron, it's being paid for by my employers's clients: since it's going to be the USP for their Web presence, they're not going to want to share it with social undesirables such as yourself.
You want an OSS Flash authoring tool, go write one. I'm writing mine 'cos that's what I'm paid to do, and that's why it's not going to be released to the world at large (plus it's designed to solve a very specific problem and would be of little use to the world at large, unless you still draw scenes using text files).
Get your head out of your arse and see how the world really works. -- Cheers
Don't be silly - COM was invented by Microsoft and is therefore the tool of the devil.
Admittedly it's the best solution out there and, let's face it, it shits all over EJB and the CCM in the middle tier environment too, but it came from Redmond and so will not be accepted as having any technical merit whatsoever by the Slashdot herd. -- Cheers
Build your own plugin: the Flash player source can be licenced from Macromedia here, as are the libraries for writing your own Flash authoring tool. I'm just finishing off the latter: it's not that hard... -- Cheers
Having been in exactly the position you're in, I sympathise. What I did was to hand in my notice, buy an off-the-shelf company and ring a dozen agaencies saying "I'm available for contract work, here are my skills, this is my rate, I'll mail you a CV". I've never looked back.
Disadvantages: having to look after yourself (if you don't work, you don't get paid), loss of all of those big-company benefits (pension schemes, private health care, company car, paid holidays, sick pay, free training)
Advantages: no office politics, no brown-nosing, significantly better pay, no unpaid overtime (if I work 70 hours a week, I get paid for every one of those seventy hours), no dull jobs (don't fancy a job? don't take it - there'll be another three along before you can blink), long holidays.
It's a little unnerving jumping out of a well-paid job into being a freelancer but there's no shortage of jobs: I've never had to spend more than a week before finding one I fancied. And, since I'm hired as a developer, that's all I do: I go to design meetings, then develop and test code before handing it over to the QA boys. Since I've been hired (at some expense) to do a job, the companies hiring me tend to both resource me well and listen to what I have to say. IMHO, it beats having a career path into a cocked hat.
(Note: I'm based in the UK, YMMV. State and National taxes may apply. Don't give to children under 36 months) -- Cheers
And your take on a centralised network-accessable store for rich data types (because not everything can be sensibly represented in ASCII) would be?
Configuring networking is a pain and requires a reboot on every change.
Partially true with 9x and NT, not so true with 2K...
You need to pay extra money to use multiple processors.
No you don't. Just plug in a second processor and run UPTOMP to update the kernel. Third and fourth processors don't even require the second step.
The file system is based on 8.3 names
No it isn't, and hasn't been since NTFS 1.0
and the shell is still based on DOS. See previous comment The system looks UGLY, compared to a Mac or a Linux box running EFM (drool).
This is puely a matter of opinion: to me, most Linux desktops look butt-ugly, largely due to the broken-ness of X. MacOS looks pretty enough, mind, but I can't take any computer system seriously when the makers think that compact keyboards and designer mice are a good idea...
MacOS doesn't have these drawbacks, and it was around before Windows and was always ahead of it.
Just which drawbacks would those be again? The preemptive multitasking? The memory protection? The MP support? So I don't want to hear that MS is responsible for all this damned "innovation".
And I don't want to hear from drooling Mac zealots that MacOS is the one true OS and every other computer on the planet should instantly self-combust because anything they can do MacOS can do better and has in fact been doing it better, and more prettily, for years already. But sadly, I've got to;-(
BTW, where's the middle tier stuff for MacOS - or, for that matter, Linux (you know, stuff like Tarantella, Tuxido, MQ etc.) -- Cheers
Traditional shadow mask CRTs are laid out as you describe, but both LCDs and Trinitron CRTs are layed out in vertical stripes (which, incidentally, is why Trinitron screens have two lines across them at approx ¼ and ¾ height: the wires which hold the screen together run across at these points). -- Cheers
There was an article published by O'reilly about how the 10-simultaneous users limit that NT workstation has and which server lacks is wholly due to registry tweaks.
And your point is? This is a restriction imposed by the Workstation licence - if you want to connect more than 10 users to an NT box then buy a licence and run NT Server, which has other tweaks as well (off the top of my head, Server quanta are the same size for both foreground and background tasks, rather than making them longer for foreground tasks as Workstation does: moreover, Server quanta are of longer duration than Workstation ones, the idea being that it's better to try and get a single work request done within a single quantum if possible rather than take the hit of context switching)
Your second comment I find a bit confusing: from where I'm standing, the whole point of an API is that it hides you from the implementation. All the user need concern his or herself with is the interface, which is fixed. What happens on the far side of the API ius irrelevant to the person on the near side of it and vice versa. The reason the registry is like it is is because it's used to store non-textual data as well as data which can be represented in ASCII - not all data is best fitted by an ASCII representation, after all... -- Cheers
Wrong: see here for details and, furthermore, don't forget that there are significant licence differences between Workstation/Professional and Server and that there's a hell of a lot more stuff in Server (IIS, DHCP server, DNS, directory management etc), and even more in Enterprise/Advanced Server (support for clustering, load balancing, (partial) support for 3GB userspace RAM rather than 2GB etc).
The registry is merely a central store for configuration information of all types: strings, numbers, random blobs etc. which can be accessed through a clearly-defined API. If you think it's part of BillG's masterplan to bend you over then you really ought to come up with some more sophisticated fantasies. -- Cheers
And since Linux Today glommed their story from the Register, you'd better accept that correction too. And as for reporting on information you saw elsewhere, did it occur to you to check your facts? It's not that difficult - see here for details. -- Cheers
Does not compute - the Register story you referenced contains absolutely nothing about.asf files hosting script or executables: it says that Microsoft have exercised their IP rights.
What you are referring to, I presume, are ASF script files. From the MSDN: "ASF script files are text files that contain information about ASF file properties, such as title, author, and copyright; markers, which can be used as chapter marks or indexes; and script commands, which can be used for URL flips and closed caption text."
Or is this just more rabid pro-Linux FUD? -- Cheers
What is Forth? Well, it's a rather groovy little language (note to FIGgers - I'm not trying to patronise Forth: I've got rather a soft spot for it) - it is not what is commonly understood by a 4GL (language for programming database applications). It's a very small stack-based language - Charles Moore, its inventor and evangelist, was an obsessive minimalist - which has been implemented on just about every microsprocessor going, making Forth code fairly portable. Since it's not much more costly at runtime than pure assembler, this makes it popular in the embedded world, where the ability to move code from one processor family to another is, for obvious reasons, highly valued.
From the comp.lang.forth FAQ:
"What is Forth?"
Forth is a stack-based, extensible language without type-checking. It is probably best known for its "reverse Polish" (postfix) arithmetic notation, familiar to users of Hewlett-Packard calculators: to add two numbers in Forth, you would type 3 5 + instead of 3+5. The fundamental program unit in Forth is the "word": a named data item, subroutine, or operator. Programming in Forth consists of defining new words in terms of existing ones. The Forth statement
: SQUARED DUP *;
defines a new word SQUARED whose function is to square a number (multiply it by itself). Since the entire language structure is embodied in words, the application programmer can "extend" Forth to add new operators, program constructs, or data types at will. The Forth "core" includes operators for integers, addresses, characters, and Boolean values; string and floating-point operators may be optionally added."
"The name FORTH was intended to suggest software for the fourth (next) generation computers, which Moore saw as being characterized by distributed small computers. The operating system he used at the time restricted file names to five characters, so the "U" was discarded. FORTH was spelled in upper case until the late 70's because of the prevalence of of upper-case-only I/O devices. The name "Forth" was generally adopted when lower case became widely available, because the word was not an acronym." -- Cheers
m15 on Win32 still won't run stably *for* *me* for more than about 10 minutes before crashing and burning (or rather just sucking mud). YMMV, of course. -- Cheers
StarOffice, Applix and the GIMP team survive because they're supporting a user base approximately one millionth the size which (in general) is not using the products in critical LOB situations and, moreover, one which is, in general, fairly technically savvy. When (or rather if) Linux "wins the desktop" - and it won't be for a while yet - wait for the crunch to come.
My guess is that if this (Linux winning on the desktop) does happen 'vendor'-provided support services are going to be the first thing to disappear: medium and large organisations are going to have to rely on their own in-house staff a lot more and small organisations are going to have to take out support contracts for everything with the equivalent of LinuxCare. -- Cheers
Be realistic: 128kb MP3 sounds like early MiniDisc players running ATRAC1 i.e. shite. On a 1" PC speaker you can't tell the difference, but put both your MP3 stream and your CD stream through a decent audio interface (thereby removing variation in the D/A) and out through a decent amp and speakers rather than a £50 "100W multimedia audio system" and tell me you can't tell the difference.
Or maybe I've just got golden ears - but sadly:-( I don't think so -- Cheers
Slashdot Mirror
Let me know when you crack multi-column text...
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Cheers
Change what you do
Change what the rest of the world does
Now, which of those is more likely to happen...
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"In Windows NT, each application written for MS-DOS runs in its own NTVDM process.
"Windows NT runs the application by using a NTVDM and VDDs. This process is called WOW, for Win16-on-Win32. Using a 16-bit NTVDM, Windows NT translates Windows 3.1-based application calls in Enhanced mode on all Intel-based and RISC-based computers.
"16-bit Windows applications also run in an NTVDM. An Intel 486 emulator in Windows NT enables16-bit Windows applications to run on RISC computers, too.
"Windows NT 4.0 runs 16-bit Windows applications as separate threads in a single NTVDM process with a shared address space. This differs from MS-DOS applications which each run in a separate NTVDM process. The Win16 NTVDM is also known as WOW (for Win16-on-Win32). The Win16 NTVDM can also run 16-bit applications On RISC processors, NTVDM emulates all Intel x86 instructions in addition to providing a virtual hardware environment.
"The Win16 NTVDM is a multithreaded process wherein each of the threads is a different 16-bit Windows application. This single process is multitasking - that is, on a multiprocessor computer, one of the 16-bit processes in the NTVDM can run at the same time as threads of other processes. However, only one 16-bit Windows application thread in an NTVDM can run at a time; all other threads of that NTVDM process are blocked. If a Win16 NTVDM thread is preempted (interrupted by a higher priority thread), the microkernel always resumes with the thread that was preempted.
"Every Win16 NTVDM includes two system threads: a Wowexec.exe thread which starts Win16 applications, and a heartbeat thread which simulates timer interrupts to the application. In addition, there is a thread for each Win16 application running in the process. Windows NT 4.0 includes an option to run a 16-bit Windows application in its own separate NTVDM process with its own address space. This allows 16-bit Windows applications to be fully preemptible and multitasking.
"The Windows NT 4.0 NTVDM provides stubs for Windows 3.1 dynamic-link libraries and drivers, and it automatically handles translation of 16-bit Windows APIs and messages."
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Cheers
you have to deal with arbitrary floorplans
you need to be able to put numbers, names etc on the image underlying the imagemap
the zooming/scrolling has to be fast - if people have to reload a 400KB image each time they zoom or pan then they're not going to be very happy
This isn't a flame - I'd like to know how this is best done. I'd add that I'm by no stretch of the imagination an HTML guru, but I did investigate other sites offering similar facilities ("it's not plagiarism, it's research") and most of them seemed to be using either client-side Java applets or the SmartPictures plugin, rather than HTML, so I concluded that it was probably at the hard-to-impossible end of the market and therefore not something that should be embarked on given our (stupidly tight) timescales.
--
Cheers
And what would you recommend instead - a browser which screenreads: "Stand 7 is 10 yards north and two aisles across from Stand 22"? While I'm all for accessability where it's an option, it's not really a goer in this case (where, for example, is the screen-reader version of Quake?)
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Cheers
And just how are we meanto to implement arbitrarily zooming and scrolling client-side imagemaps?
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Cheers
I'm just finishing off writing an engine which builds .SWF files (Flash movie files, for the Lynx generation out there). This means that text-only browsers, people running graphical browsers which don't support the Flash Player, people on Palms or WAP phones or two-tin-cans-and-a-piece-of-string or whatever the fsck the last 0.1% of the population connect with won't be able to use some of the functionality.
The reason we're using Flash, however, is because it's the best option out there. The requirement was to deliver an interactive floorplan for trade-shows to the browser: it had to be zoomable, moveable, fast and respond to clicks. Given this, Flash seemed like the best option, especially since SVG support is currently nigh-on non-existent (actually, having said that, Adobe have released an SVG ... plugin. Hmm).
Does anyone out there have any better suggestions? We didn't, so we decided to abandon the <5% of the market that weren't running Netscape 4+ or IE4+. Life's tough, I'm afraid (c.f. the move in the UK from 405 line TV signals to 625 line - eventually, you've got to abandon some people).
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Cheers
Well, the tech. preview for IPv6 under W2K is available here: presumably the 9x series and NT4 will both be patchable (it's no more than a new WinSock i.e a new TCP/IP stack). It's also, AFAIK, in the 2.3 and 2.4 kernel series.
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Cheers
You want an OSS Flash authoring tool, go write one. I'm writing mine 'cos that's what I'm paid to do, and that's why it's not going to be released to the world at large (plus it's designed to solve a very specific problem and would be of little use to the world at large, unless you still draw scenes using text files).
Get your head out of your arse and see how the world really works.
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Cheers
Admittedly it's the best solution out there and, let's face it, it shits all over EJB and the CCM in the middle tier environment too, but it came from Redmond and so will not be accepted as having any technical merit whatsoever by the Slashdot herd.
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Cheers
Build your own plugin: the Flash player source can be licenced from Macromedia here, as are the libraries for writing your own Flash authoring tool. I'm just finishing off the latter: it's not that hard...
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Cheers
Having been in exactly the position you're in, I sympathise. What I did was to hand in my notice, buy an off-the-shelf company and ring a dozen agaencies saying "I'm available for contract work, here are my skills, this is my rate, I'll mail you a CV". I've never looked back.
Disadvantages: having to look after yourself (if you don't work, you don't get paid), loss of all of those big-company benefits (pension schemes, private health care, company car, paid holidays, sick pay, free training)
Advantages: no office politics, no brown-nosing, significantly better pay, no unpaid overtime (if I work 70 hours a week, I get paid for every one of those seventy hours), no dull jobs (don't fancy a job? don't take it - there'll be another three along before you can blink), long holidays.
It's a little unnerving jumping out of a well-paid job into being a freelancer but there's no shortage of jobs: I've never had to spend more than a week before finding one I fancied. And, since I'm hired as a developer, that's all I do: I go to design meetings, then develop and test code before handing it over to the QA boys. Since I've been hired (at some expense) to do a job, the companies hiring me tend to both resource me well and listen to what I have to say. IMHO, it beats having a career path into a cocked hat.
(Note: I'm based in the UK, YMMV. State and National taxes may apply. Don't give to children under 36 months)
--
Cheers
And your take on a centralised network-accessable store for rich data types (because not everything can be sensibly represented in ASCII) would be?
Configuring networking is a pain and requires a reboot on every change.
Partially true with 9x and NT, not so true with 2K...
You need to pay extra money to use multiple processors.
No you don't. Just plug in a second processor and run UPTOMP to update the kernel. Third and fourth processors don't even require the second step.
The file system is based on 8.3 names
No it isn't, and hasn't been since NTFS 1.0
and the shell is still based on DOS. See previous comment The system looks UGLY, compared to a Mac or a Linux box running EFM (drool).
This is puely a matter of opinion: to me, most Linux desktops look butt-ugly, largely due to the broken-ness of X. MacOS looks pretty enough, mind, but I can't take any computer system seriously when the makers think that compact keyboards and designer mice are a good idea...
MacOS doesn't have these drawbacks, and it was around before Windows and was always ahead of it.
Just which drawbacks would those be again? The preemptive multitasking? The memory protection? The MP support? So I don't want to hear that MS is responsible for all this damned "innovation".
And I don't want to hear from drooling Mac zealots that MacOS is the one true OS and every other computer on the planet should instantly self-combust because anything they can do MacOS can do better and has in fact been doing it better, and more prettily, for years already. But sadly, I've got to ;-(
BTW, where's the middle tier stuff for MacOS - or, for that matter, Linux (you know, stuff like Tarantella, Tuxido, MQ etc.)
--
Cheers
Traditional shadow mask CRTs are laid out as you describe, but both LCDs and Trinitron CRTs are layed out in vertical stripes (which, incidentally, is why Trinitron screens have two lines across them at approx ¼ and ¾ height: the wires which hold the screen together run across at these points).
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Cheers
Sadly I've no mod points, but this is brilliant
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Cheers
And your point is? This is a restriction imposed by the Workstation licence - if you want to connect more than 10 users to an NT box then buy a licence and run NT Server, which has other tweaks as well (off the top of my head, Server quanta are the same size for both foreground and background tasks, rather than making them longer for foreground tasks as Workstation does: moreover, Server quanta are of longer duration than Workstation ones, the idea being that it's better to try and get a single work request done within a single quantum if possible rather than take the hit of context switching)
Your second comment I find a bit confusing: from where I'm standing, the whole point of an API is that it hides you from the implementation. All the user need concern his or herself with is the interface, which is fixed. What happens on the far side of the API ius irrelevant to the person on the near side of it and vice versa. The reason the registry is like it is is because it's used to store non-textual data as well as data which can be represented in ASCII - not all data is best fitted by an ASCII representation, after all...
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Cheers
The registry is merely a central store for configuration information of all types: strings, numbers, random blobs etc. which can be accessed through a clearly-defined API. If you think it's part of BillG's masterplan to bend you over then you really ought to come up with some more sophisticated fantasies.
--
Cheers
And since Linux Today glommed their story from the Register, you'd better accept that correction too. And as for reporting on information you saw elsewhere, did it occur to you to check your facts? It's not that difficult - see here for details.
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Cheers
What you are referring to, I presume, are ASF script files. From the MSDN: "ASF script files are text files that contain information about ASF file properties, such as title, author, and copyright; markers, which can be used as chapter marks or indexes; and script commands, which can be used for URL flips and closed caption text."
Or is this just more rabid pro-Linux FUD?
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Well, if the alternative's the Texas solution of killing him before he can appeal then yes...
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Erm... http://msdn.microsoft.com? free and online enough for you?
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From the comp.lang.forth FAQ:
"What is Forth?"
Forth is a stack-based, extensible language without type-checking. It is probably best known for its "reverse Polish" (postfix) arithmetic notation, familiar to users of Hewlett-Packard calculators: to add two numbers in Forth, you would type 3 5 + instead of 3+5. The fundamental program unit in Forth is the "word": a named data item, subroutine, or operator. Programming in Forth consists of defining new words in terms of existing ones. The Forth statement
defines a new word SQUARED whose function is to square a number (multiply it by itself). Since the entire language structure is embodied in words, the application programmer can "extend" Forth to add new operators, program constructs, or data types at will. The Forth "core" includes operators for integers, addresses, characters, and Boolean values; string and floating-point operators may be optionally added."And, from Rather, Colbourn, and Moore: The Evolution of Forth in: History of Programming Languages (HOPL-II), ACM Press/Addison-Wesley 1996.
"The name FORTH was intended to suggest software for the fourth (next) generation computers, which Moore saw as being characterized by distributed small computers. The operating system he used at the time restricted file names to five characters, so the "U" was discarded. FORTH was spelled in upper case until the late 70's because of the prevalence of of upper-case-only I/O devices. The name "Forth" was generally adopted when lower case became widely available, because the word was not an acronym."
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Cheers
m15 on Win32 still won't run stably *for* *me* for more than about 10 minutes before crashing and burning (or rather just sucking mud). YMMV, of course.
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Cheers
My guess is that if this (Linux winning on the desktop) does happen 'vendor'-provided support services are going to be the first thing to disappear: medium and large organisations are going to have to rely on their own in-house staff a lot more and small organisations are going to have to take out support contracts for everything with the equivalent of LinuxCare.
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Cheers
Or maybe I've just got golden ears - but sadly :-( I don't think so
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