What your mind rejects, mine finds freeing. What's idiomatic and natural depends on personal experience and evolves, as does the culture around you. There was a time in my life when I may have rejected leading commas as well, but at some point I came around to them and have never looked back. It works for me. I legitimately find it easier on my mind, and it has caused me far fewer annoyances than a comma-less last column has. I have colleagues that use it as well out of their own preference. I would suggest that insisting on a universal orthodoxy of stylistic preferences is much more oppressing to the spirit than occasionally needing to adapt the mind to the reading of something formatted in an unfamiliar style.
People seem to think nothing of putting all other syntax on a new line (+, -, ||, &&, AND, OR are all fine) but as soon as you put a comma on a new line everyone loses their minds.
I didn’t start listening to PJ Harvey until later in her career, but Rid of Me is one of my favorite albums. It had a sort of harshness that put me off at first, but once I got past that it really grew on me, and now that perceived harshness is an inseparable part of the final product for me. I don’t know how much of that to attribute to Albini or what the album might have been with a different producer, but what it did become still stands out strongly in my musical experience.
I love the sound of Rid of Me, with one major exception: the radical volume changes on the title track and Highway 61. I 100% don’t understand what was going on there; it makes it impossible to listen to without riding the volume control and it bears no resemblance to how it was performed live.
A Mogwai album did this to me once, while I was wearing headphones. I’ve never bothered to work through the process where I’d know when and where this would happen so I can listen to them again. I just dropped them.
Despite my phenomenal experience hearing them live in Cambridge MA in the 90s. Loudest band I’ve ever suffered through. But that was live.
That depends on if they are using 64 bit or not. The 16bit VDM was deprecated on that move from 32 to 64. Which is the majority of most installs these days.
What is kind of neat is every windows application/dll is a valid DOS application. The first part of all of them is a valid MZ DOS 16 EXEcutable. Windows just treats it as a skippable header and reads the real header that is about 100 bytes in and then decides which subsystem to fire up (win3x, win32, OS/2, etc). But if you take a exe compiled today with current tools and put it on a DOS 3.3 box it would run the exe and print out it can not run (the exe has that in there).
Also from that era not all DOS applications were exclusively 16 bit. Many were hybrid. Just to have better control over the memory space instead of using segmentation was usually worth the speed boost (as well as the bigger registers). Windows from that era usually had extra 'pid' file where you could basically tag the executable as 'hey you are about to run a 32 bit app get out of the way windows oh and support dpmi while you are at it'.
If that was a Windows 10 screenshot then yes there would have been the possibility of it being the 32-bit edition running a DOS app through NTVDM. But the poster says Windows 11, which does not have a 32-bit edition.
I’m not aware of 64-bit Windows being able to run 32-bit DPMI DOS apps natively, I think those still required NTVDM.
Pretty sure you are right. As I think that is what setup the interrupts for it. Win9x did it very differently and would basically just put command.com back in charge of stuff to sort of make it work with a sys file. NT with DPMI programs was usually very hit or or miss (more miss). If they did not play just right with windows the thing would just crash out.
Think there might be a win11 32 bit out there. But nothing that MS sells to normal end customers. But my brain may be playing tricks on me and I am confusing different articles I have read. But that would probably be some sort of weird kiosk ODM build. Not what most normal people would have (like in that post).
They were kind of forced to. WoW (classic, not WoW64) relied on the CPU being able to switch to a 16-bit context, in much the way modern WoW uses amd64's compatibility mode. OTVDM's project page directly mentions this as a core component:
> CPU Emulator
> 64-bit Windows cannot modify LDT(NtSetInformationProcess(,ProcessLdtInformation,,) always returns error)
They would have had to replace/extend WoW with an architecture emulator. Raising the development/support complexity quite a bit for little gain (few people that use Windows 11 are running DOS or Win16 applications today, beyond retro gamers who use DOSBox anyways).
Win16 got dropped at some point, probably because keeping it didn't add up financially. I have little doubt they could have kept support for much older stuff.
There's a "pirate" port of NTVDM to 64-bit Windows (from leaked NT 4.0 source) so it's certainly not technically infeasible: https://github.com/leecher1337/ntvdmx64
Something that confuses me is that this states it's running a binary compiled 30years ago. How is this not 16bit?
I'm aware of win32s, I used to run it but still it seems unlikely this is a win32 console app unless there's an incredibly unlikely set of circumstances behind this.
Or perhaps it was simply recompiled after all despite what the Twitter post states?
My guess is this is a PE format type windows application. Though I suppose you could get a NE format file to work correctly if the binary was compiled as 32 bit. My memory is a bit fuzzy on this but I think you did have the option to compile either way.
In fact looking into this further the only thing windows 11 lacks is the ntvdm which allows some dos api calls. If your binary is straightforward and not tied to msdos which this is it's fine. So I think the idea that this is a 32bit windows console application is completely untrue. It's also intuitively untrue when you consider the age of the app being run here.
The fact that there is no Windows 11 version with NTVDM is why this must be a Win32 console app, assuming the poster is truthful. Windows NT 3.1 came out in 1993. This being in a directory called “ntbin” gives another hint.
I see that makes sense. I feel it's also a little misleading from the original post. An exceptionally specific binary from 1993 works but the implication here is that the compatibility is more than this.
Author here. I've been running Windows since 3.0 and I copy my old tool folders with me whenever I change machines or upgrade the OS. This GZIP.EXE is the oldest EXE I have in my \ntbin tool folder that still works. The folder has 579 EXE files.
I think that is the point being made. This exe is cherry picked as the oldest working exe, it isn't like every 30 year old exe in that folder still works.
