Posts by Howard Winter

UK to block Kodi pirates in real-time: Saturday kick-off

Re: A New Sport

"Maybe its time to find a new sport for armchair fans to obsess over. Too much money poured into TV, clubs and players has ruined it..."

NO! Leave Dwile Flonking alone!

User lubed PC with butter, because pressing a button didn't work

Notepad?

Notepad++?

EMACS?

VI?

Amateurs - EDLIN for the win!

Brit ISP TalkTalk blocks control tool TeamViewer

If this trend ocntinue, we'll all have to use pcAnywhere for DOS in the end...

(Goes to find yellow Serial-Serial cable)

UK's new Snoopers' Charter just passed an encryption backdoor law by the backdoor

Re: If people didn't want this...

"Why did they vote the Conservatives in, last time round?"

I didn't - in fact most people didn't!

Only the crappy election system that we have resulted in this mob got in with full control on a minority vote.

The idea that you get 1 vote every 5 years, which may be wasted if you are in a "safe seat", is frankly ludicrous as a way to run "democracy". I voted to replace it with a slighly less crappy way of doing it, but unfortunately the lies perpetrated by the other side meant that people were conned into voting for the status quo, and the current tragedy is the result.

Kids today are so stupid they fall for security scams more often than greybeards

Number crunching

"Only 17 per cent of those taking the bait were over 55 years old, but 34 percent of folks aged between 36 and 54 fell for scams."

93.45% of statistics are made up...

Maplin Electronics demands cash with menaces

I too had a Maplin mail-order account number (five digits, I think?) and used to use their spaceship-covered catalogues as reference books. Then they opened the little shop in Burnt Oak (between Edgware and Colindale) and I'd go there on a Saturday to browse and buy things that looked interesting or useful. I understand that shop has now closed :-(

Watford is now my closest, and it's almost impossible to park (I refuse to pay to park to spend money in shops!). It was the beginning of the end when they got rig of the component counter at the back and incorporated it into the shelf area for remote controlled cars and disco balls.

Now the chain that I'd like to see go under is Staples. They used to have reasonably good prices, and regular sales that made it worth stocking up on whatever it was. But their prices have skyrocketed, and they don't have the sales any more. A fiver for a ringbinder? And Really Useful Boxes at prices higher than anywhere else - a 3litre one can be had at ASDA for £3, Rymans have occasional special offers such as four for a tenner, I think the last price I saw at Staples was pushing a fiver!

The US version of B&Q is Home Depot (even has the same orange livery) and a while ago B&Q were thinking of buying them - not the other way round, strangely - but it never happened. The weird thing, to us, is that Home Depot is where all the tradesmen go for supplies and tools - something B&Q have never achieved here. And there are still a few corner hardware stores over there - the last one in St.Albans (with that parafinny-smell and wooden drawers containing everything you could ever want) closed when the building was sold to developers, and there is now a block of flats there. Tragic.

I think Maplin do the Pi-ZERO DAC for a price similar to the online places, but without the postage. I may see if I can get one before they go bust! :-)

Is the world ready for a bare-metal OS/2 rebirth?

Some Answers...

First I should declare an interest - you'll find me on the "About Arca Noae" page on www.arcanoa.com

Secondly, I want to answer a few of the comments on this thread.

Blue Lion will not be free, but it certainly won't be "very expensive" - it probably won't be "expensive" either! When we do release prices, I think a lot of people will be pleasantly surprised.

Running current Windows software: Very hard, as MS have a lot of it very much locked in, using facilities in their operating systems that are not easy, or even possible, to provide in others without treading on IP issues.

But a lot of modern software isn't "Windows software", it's written for other systems such as Linux, and is often open-source, so producing a version that runs under OS/2 is feasible, and to prove that my daily-use machine under eComStation is running Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice 4.1, CUPS printing, and Lucide (.PDF viewer) as well as a lot of software written specifically for OS/2, such as ClipView (saves the last "n" Copies to the clipboard so I can go back to a previous one and paste it), PMView (picture viewer, converter, and simple image editor), EasySync (file synchroniser), LANscan (scans IP addresses so I can find where a device I've just connected to the network has ended up), OpenSSH (so I can communicate with my headless Raspberry Pis, for example) and lots of others.

As for "why bare metal"? Because it's the best way! All the CPU cycles are doing what you want, not having to administer things "above" the operating system(s). When I go to the shops I drive my car, I don't get it towed there...

As for time-to-boot, this may have been a problem in the '90s, but not these days.

As others have said, in the early days OS/2 needed "a lot" of RAM - I think 4MB was stated as the minimum, whereas Win95 said it needed less, but now it's turned round - I am typing this on a machine running three major applications, and which has less memory installed than Windows XP needs just to load without any applications! I haven't run Win10 so I have no idea how that compares.

Is Blue Lion going to replace Windows in the market? No of course not. Is it going to be popular with people who like OS/2 and want to run it, or who are curious to try something that isn't from Redmond? Certainly!

Cheers,

Howard