Re: "They have that kind of money"
For the price of a Ferrari, would it grey?
8128 publicly visible posts • joined 14 Jun 2007
Thunderbird can talk to exchange using a paid-for add-in. I used to use it but then my Exchange stopped serving anything except trusted clients and that didn't include "thunderbird on a linux box outside the usual domain". A fair admin policy decision, but not a technical limitation. A friendly Exchange admin might even enable the IMAP support, in which case no add-in is required. Again, a policy decision rather than a technical limitation.
Perhaps if MS really screw up Outlook, Exchange admins might be irritated in their own daily usage and be open to the idea of facilitating broader access.
I think you are confusing two things. Win3 could run in "real mode" where it did indeed do all that shuffling. It was a fantastic overlay manager and ran quite happily on an actual 8088. Sane users ran in "386-enhanced" mode where the windows kernel was a protected mode OS moving segments by fiddling with descriptors.
Then of course there wasthe third thing, where DOS device drivers were "supported" by running them in the first VM and redirecting all device I/O from other VMs into the first one so the poor little DOS driver never had to worry about being "instanced".
Impressive, in a depressing way, that it ever worked.
“I have written a PM app that hangs the system (sometimes quite graphically)”
This was a design flaw in OS/2 (or Presentation Manager) which MS avoided in NT. PM used a single thread for keyboard and mouse input (which put it at the mercy of one badly written app. NT decided very early on (that is, entirely within code that they controlled) which app would get the input and maintained a separate input queue for each app.
I suspect that if OS/2 had won the day then this design flaw would have been fixed. (Perhaps it was. I didn't keep up after it was clear they'd lost the market.) But it was definitely there and MS definitely learned the lesson.
"The existence of _MS_ OS/2 2 shows it didn't happen like that and even as MS was getting ready to launch Win3, it had MS OS/2 2, lacking only the WPS."
I'm a little puzzled by this. I too, was around at the time and I was aleays under the impression that Win3 was a bodge job: taking the (beta) OS/2 kernel and running the latest development version of Windows (then a 286-friendly but strictly 16-bit system) in one of the virtual DOS boxes. This explains why Win3's "virtual device drivers" used the same "linear executable" format as OS/2 device drivers. They were basically the same.
Microsoft's real commercial genius was to realise that there were bog-all OS/2 programs (all 16-bit) but lots of Win1 and Win2 programs, so what people would actually buy was a better way of running the latter, not the former. Win3 was that better way.
It was also possible, though I can't recall the details, to launch Windows in such a way that only KRNL386.EXE was loaded and not GDI.EXE or USER.EXE. this gave you a DOS session running in the virtual DOS box. It was a nice illustration of how 16-bit Windows was always just a fancy DOS program, but it wasn't actually useful because at the time there was really only one DPMI-capable program in the universe and that was Windows.
"Bezos is the one talking about millions of people living and working in space."
Trying to think of a task that is easier to do in space than on Earth that would not also be far better performed by a robot rather than a ham-fisted monkey.
...
Nah. Can't think of one. Not for the first time I'm left thinking that these "tech billionaires" are actualy just billionaires and haven't a clue about the tech. They're businessmen who got lucky early and haven't regressed to the mean yet. (Though Elon is having a damn good go. I wish him luck.)
"I wonder what an AI would be like if its training data only came from black bin bags full of magazines found in the woods?"
The porn would be milder, since there are laws about what you can publish in a magazine and economic factors mitigating against appealing to the most extreme (and hence, smallest minority) tastes.
Another test of AGI is "can it drive a car?" because nearly all adult humans can with a very modest amount of practice.
There are doubtless many other examples and all are perfectly fair because if you are going to claim general then you must be prepared to be tested generally.
I did it when I was a student (apart from the hiding from daylight part) and both my sons did it extensively during the Covid lockdowns.
We may not count as fully human but none of us had (or have) any trouble at all in adopting diurnal cycle well over 24 hours.
The code *should* write itself, in the sense that anyone writing a new window manager should (1) suspect that there might be a standard for thus, since the concept is older than they are, (2) bother to look for it, and (3) offer it as the default behaviour.
I'd offer a car analogy but you ought to be able to supply that for yourself.
The smartest response from an LLM to this kind of problem is to direct the questioner to the website of their router manufacturer. That would a perfect (and universal) answer if router manufacturer websites were designed so that a person could easily find the answer from there.
But no, let's try and teach the LLM about every kind of router ever made (or rebadged) by anyone.
"Every step that involves AI has a human checking in at the end."
...because in a war zone the AI is really bad at recognising your own team, whereas a human is merely unreliable.
(In most modern conflicts, the hi-tech weaponry is only on one side, leading to the exacerbating factor that only one side is actively trying to hide from the AI.)
"Unless big strides are made for localhost LLMs"
Well that would be useful. The training (using public data) might still happen elsewhere, but using the model could run (using private data) on-prem. You'd still only need a few such machines though, since there's this amazing new tech called a LAN. Perhaps Dell have heard of it?
At least in python, the "semantic white space" is merely an insistence that you indentation must agree with your scoping. As far as I'm aware, it is universally agreed that a failure to agree in this way is a horrible thing to do, so what's the objection to taking advantage of it?
" But heavy, and I'm guessing rather tricky to cool. "
Just a bit! If your reactor is 50% efficient (which is optimistic) then for every megawatt you use you need to radiate another one into space, or else your satellite will warm up and eventually melt. That radiation has to come from components that are at-or-near room temperature, so we're talking about a lot of surface area.
Point 2 means that we don't even need to assume point 1.
Microsoft are a big enough target that any and every troll knows where to go to fill tbeir trousers with undeserved "royalties". Microsoft know this. Therefore they have to defend themselves by being an even bigger troll.
Where does the OS come into it? The article claims that one instance of Chromium (branded Edge) is trawling the open tabs (each of which is a separate process) in another instance of Chromium (branded Chrome).
I wouldn't be at all surprised if there was a Chromium mechanism for trawling "all open tabs" and not terribly surprised if it can't distinguish between Edge and Chrome. That would make this a legitimate trawl implemented carelessly.