And my USB-DOS project includes it, for a complete environment you can boot and run direct from USB, without installation, on any PC which supports legacy boot.
Around COVID lockdown #1 I did a lot more walking outside, pushing a pram and listening to music on headphones.
For years I'd been using cheap wired headphones from exhibition swag and things.
I put a pair through the washing machine. Top tip: this is really not good for them.
I looked online and found I could buy a brand new pair of my preferred Sony in-ear ones for $NotALot.
I bought the absolutely top of the line most expensive bass-boost in-ear buds.
They cost the equivalent of $20 (about £15) and the sound is amazing.
The point being here: because all the fashion-victims want Bluetooth, wired headphones have got really cheap and top quality premium grade ones cost less than a modest meal, or alternatively perhaps, less than I could easily drink in beer while listening to 1 CD or album.
Shun wireless. Go back to wired. Get an adaptor if your phone doesn't have a socket. You can get really good earphones for very little money now, they never need charging, never go flat, never need pairing, are compatible with every OS able to play sound, and they come with a handy tool to stop them falling out and you losing them, called "a cable".
Also: the microphone is great as well. I've recorded podcasts with them. The quality is way better than my £300 over-ear sound-cancelling premium Bluetooth headset, which I now only use while onboard aeroplanes.
Sorry for the slow reply. I've looked and there doesn't seem to be any way to tell.
I've used them regularly for about 5 or 6 years now and the paint is wearing off. The only readable markings are the [L] and [R] indications for which goes in which year.
Nickel/neodynium bass drivers, quite large and chunky compared to cheaper Sony 'phones. The cables go into a separate fat little cylinder to which the earbud itself is permanently attached at a fixed angle.
However, they're not noticeable in the ear at all and they're very comfy to wear.
These are listed at £40 now but before the recent burst of inflation I think about half that is plausible.
> If I wanted to change most MS stuff, like Office, I could grab the COM object out of a registry, and override it with mine
This goes back a very long time -- at least to the Windows 3.0 timeframe.
The IBM-only 32-bit OS/2 2.0 came out around the same time as Windows 3.1.
OS/2 2 could run Windows 3 inside what was effectively a VM (a decade before true VMs came to the x86 platform), running the Microsoft code on top of OS/2's built-in DOS emulator.
I remember an IBM person objecting to a journalist saying "so you have access to the Windows source code, and you patch it to run under OS/2?"
Reportedly, the IBM engineer looked a bit pained and said "we don't patch it -- we superclass it in memory to make it a good citizen, well-behaved inside OS/2's protected mode."
(It is over 30Y ago so forgive me if I am not verbatim.)
This was subsequently demonstrated to be true rather than a marketing claim. OS/2 2.0 and 2.1 included a "WinOS2" environment. OS/2 Warp 3 made this an option: it was sold in 2 versions, one with a blue box which contained a Windows 3.1 environment, and one with a red box which did not contain WinOS2 but could be installed on top of an existing Windows 3.1 system and then took over the entire Windows environment, complete with all your installed apps, and ran that inside OS/2.
So you kept all your installed 16-bit apps and settings but got a new 32-bit OS with full memory protection and pre-emptive multitasking as well.
Bear in mind that Windows has not activation mechanism then, so you could copy a complete Windows 3.x installation onto a new PC, change some drivers and it just worked without complaint.
So you could buy a new high-end 486 PC, copy Windows off your old 386, install OS/2 Warp over the top and have a whole new OS with all your apps and their files still running.
This was amazingly radical stuff in the first half of the 1990s.
They invested huge amount of resources to make sure it is backward compatible in NT, to the disagreement of David Cutler. There is a NTVDM extended with WoW for Windows 16-bit, AFAIK. I have a copy of leaked source code of NT 3.5 but I'm not good enough to understand the code. Also probably modern VMs such as DOSBOX do a better job emulating 16-bit stuffs.
> It baffles me that anyone would consider this a question at all.
Thank you for saying this. I read this article a few days ago and felt the same: it's a 64-bit gigahertz-class RISC purporse designed internet server with a gig of RAM, running a current OS released less than 4 months ago.
OF COURSE it can host a website. A hundred active ones at once, I should think.
I do think there's a great deal wrong with that, and I won't read it at all.
Human can speak unto human unless there's language barrier. I am not interested in anyone's mechanically-recovered verbiage, no matter how much they massaged it.
Makes me wonder how I would react to Star Trek's universal translator today. Feels like even if there is a language barrier, I would prefer to but in the effort to break it down rather than have a magical solution that may or may not get things across correctly.
Translation is great, and it's one of the few things LLMs really excel at.
What many people don't seem to realise, though, is that there's a vast yawning difference between "take this text and translate it from language A to language B" and "take this text and summarise it" -- which bots that can't even count simply cannot do. If a model can't count, it can't work out which subjects come up more or less frequently, for instance, and therefore which are more important.
If it were two humans speaking through a communicator in real time, you can work out what the bot is saying and get around its foibles.
I have personal experience of this. Way back in about 2008 or so, there was a bot known as the Salmon:
It called itself (adjective-beginning-with-S)(Salmon), such as @SuspiciousSalmon.
It scanned Livejournal and looked for profiles with AOL AIM addresses. If 2 accounts posted LJ updates more or less simultaneously, it knew you were both online and messaged you both, typically with an extremely sexual message, and then left you to talk. The snag was, the bot gave you both the same fake name, and any attempt to give your real name or LJ or AOL screenname was replaced with the bot alias.
It got me and a random woman in Baltimore and it took us concerted effort to find out who each other really were. The fun bit is that we're still in touch and occasionally chat or exchange emails.
With human thought, in real time you can bypass limitations introduced by a bot. Do it to static text, including program code, and you can't.
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