I question the article's premise. The fact that Martin uses DOS specifically to write his books doesn't mean he endorses DOS as the best. They even mention that he uses Windows for web-browsing, email, and taxes — presumably common daily activities. It sounds like he sticks with DOS because WordStar is a barebones, focused word processor, but I doubt he tries to perform any other tasks on that computer.
What I'd like to know: does he print the manuscript right off that DOS computer and give it to the publisher that way, like a savage? Or does he have some means of saving the document to a disk, transferring it to the Internet-enabled computer, and submitting digitally? Either way, this workflow sounds like a pain in the ass both for him and his publisher.
He should probably just find a simpler text editor for the modern computer that is either missing the features he doesn't want (spellcheck and punctuation correction seem to be the standouts), or is able to disable them. Hint to George R.R. Martin: all word processors have the ability to turn those features off. You're crippling yourself unnecessarily!
No worries. I just posted it because it was funny. DOS is hardly what you'd call a robust operating system. Because the truth at the end of the day is that Every OS Sucks.
Delays, delays delays. I feel like I've been falling out of touch with computer tech but I'm not sure it's me. Time between new upgraded products has been growing longer and process shrinkage seems to be stalling everywhere. Whole families of graphics cards coming out all at once just doesn't happen anymore.
Intel released Sandy Bridge in 2011. Since then we had Ivy bridge which was a slight improvement followed by Haswell, another slight improvement in terms of performance, and the Broadwell update for desktop systems may well not be seen until around September...2015. And Broadwell is unlikely to bring a significant increase in performance. So in 4 years time there won't have really been enough of a performance increase to justify an upgrade.
Remember when computers were said to be out of date by the time they reached store shelves? I miss those days. I REALLY feel a need to cheer HP on for stuff like this because current tech has blatantly been slowing its progress.
Microsoft bought Minecraft and Notch bailed, but that's already old news. There's some new graphics card launches that are quite impressive. NVIDIA's Maxwell certainly seems to deliver.
Yet, what really has me strangely interested is the new USB standard joining forces with DisplayPort. That's right, USB+Display+Power (up to 100W) over a single cable.
And so, Windows 7 apparently ate Windows 9 so now we'll be getting Windows 10 next year. In fairness they would have called it Windows One to fit other recent branding, but they kinda already had Windows 1.0 way back when. Seriously though, you really could say 7 ate 9. If Windows 7 hadn't maintained such a dominance over Windows 8, a Windows 9 might have happened and been a simple evolution of Windows 8 instead of the next windows being more of an advancement of both 7 and 8 both.
...of course there may be other reasons for the odd naming too.
Microsoft is on some kind of unification branding theme lately hence they have XBox One, OneDrive, OneNote, etc. Of course the end result is that now everyone calls their game system the X-bone.
That reminds me of when Ford came out with the Freestyle, they renamed the Windstar to the Freestar to match. It drove me nuts because there was no real change in the vehicle itself to make the name change meaningful.
And then when the Five Hundred and the Freestyle weren't selling well, they renamed them Taurus and Taurus X, defeating the purpose of the Windstar/Freestar change altogether.
I dunno, renaming things without significantly changing them is just a pet peeve of mine. Like how sports stadiums get named after companies, and then the contract runs out and they become named after different companies. Or when cities rename roads in honor of people. I'd rather they just wait until it's time to build a new road, and then name that one after somebody.
Actually, no. It's less like what Ford did and more like what Lincoln is doing now. Lately they've got this awful naming scheme in which they don't even use names. Their current lineup consists of the MKS, MKZ, MKX, MKT, MKC, and... Navigator.
If car companies really want to confuse you with constant renaming, mismatched or inconsistant product family names, or obscure alpha-numeric codes instead of names they'd still have to step up their game to compete against the likes of AMD, NVIDIA, or even Intel. I've known a lot of cases of graphics cards being rebranded.
A Geforce 8800 GT became a Geforce 9800 GT, A Geforce 9800 GTX was a slightly overclocked Geforce 8800 GTS. A Geforce 9800+ was renamed to a Geforce GTS 250.
My Radeon 5770 had been rebranded as a Radeon 6770.
Nvidia's Geforce 750 is actually the same new generation of hardware as the Geforce 970 and 980 that just came out (Maxwell), while the Gefoce 760 and 770 are rebranded 680 and 670 cards.
Don't get me started on various bottom-end graphics cards that would get rebranded 3-5 times before they die off for good...
When my brother was working at Best Buy, he noticed something similar with the TVs. Those super cheap Black Friday specials are sometimes just renumbered older models, which kinda makes them tough to repair or get parts for because you've got a model number that was only on sale for a day.
Microsoft released MS-DOS Mobile! I installed it on my phone! Wait...it's just a joke app. Darn it. Oh well, it's still fun. It pretty well made my day yesterday, though there was no shortage of fun prank things going on amongst the big tech companies. Like google maps pac-man.
I should rant about other stuff at some point. With OpenGL getting repalced and DirectX12 coming stuff is happening...
My grandmother just gave me her old computer as she never uses the thing, so I wiped it and started from scratch. It runs Windows XP, and I hate to say it, but... we finally seem to have reached a point where it's difficult to use the internet on a plain copy of Windows XP.
The IE6 that it starts off with has always been awful, but now it flat-out refuses to load a lot of pages, especially HTTPS ones which are becoming more and more common. Last month Microsoft would've automatically upgraded me to IE8, but now that XP support is discontinued, Windows Update doesn't function anymore. You can still manually download updates from Microsoft's website, except... Microsoft blocks you from using it because the browser's too old. Firefox 3.6.28, the last version compatible with Windows XP, has also become scarce. Had to go through a few sites to find a working download link.
Ah well, it's still sorta fun. Messing around with outdated computers has been kind of a hobby of mine this year. I'm learning about working on and upgrading PCs. Maybe one day I can turn them into the world's least-efficient render farm.
Yeah...the internet wasn't what it was. Also, there are people (including people who make Firefox) who think we should transition the entire web to https so ALL web traffic is encrypted. IE6...isn't really suitable for todays web. At all. In fact IE 11 is technically going to be the end of IE. In it's place will be the new Edge browser.
I guess I had my fun with old computers back in high school hanging out with my one friend who had tons of old computer parts and generally just cobbled a bunch of old parts together to make working computers. Have a couple friends over? Piece together a couple more rigs and load up some Diablo for fun times.
Now I prefer to think more about the future of hardware. Windows 10...Intel Skylake and Cannonlake processors...AMD's Zen...PCIe ssds using M.2 connectors or maybe sata express, USB 3.1 with the new type C connector, Monitors that support variable refresh rates...the upcoming releases for DirectX 12 and Vulkan...In the nearer term I'm really curious to see how AMD's upcoming Fiji GPU fares with its fancy HBM goodness.
Also I'm impatient for 14/16nm to become a thing for more than just Intel. 20nm seems to have been the black sheep most just left to Apple so most companies are still building on 28nm.
Eventually I'm planning to get a state-of-the-art current desktop PC, but I'm conserving resources at the moment. That USB 3 is looking pretty cool though. Won't have to plug every peripheral in three times anymore.
Also, it turns out I was wrong about automatic updates no longer working with XP... that computer was just set up to wait until the middle of the night to check for them. And I found out about this unofficial "Service Pack 4" you can install that contains a bunch of previous security updates, and also messes with the registry to make Microsoft think your computer is an ATM or cash register. Those machines are supported with security updates through 2019.
Chrome is maintaining support for Windows XP SP2 through the end of the year if you want something a little more modern than Firefox 3 and a lot less terrible than IE8.
You could also try Opera? Although everything after Opera 12 is based on Chromium and thus you might as well use Chrome. Also, Chrome as I understand it can be a problem for old computers with very limited resources. Needs a lot of memory with those separate tab processes. Maybe Opera 12? I'm not sure if that'd be a better choice than old version of Firefox or if it would even be good on old, slow computers.
After looking into the Chrome thing, I found out that Firefox does still support XP. It was Windows versions older than XP that stopped at 3. Which is good, because I'm no Chrome fan. Also, I'm not sure what the reason is for Opera's continued existence if it's just Chrome now.
Turns out that there is also an XP-compatible build of my browser of choice, Pale Moon. It's basically just Firefox but without all the user-unfriendly changes they've been making over the past couple years. Oddly, it only runs on one of the two XP computers I have sitting around. The other one will just have to stick with Firefox, then.
Firefox is probably best. I thought about Pale Moon after I posted that. Good thought. Opera really is a sad thing these days. If you really need Chrome but want to stay as clear from google as you can, I guess it's an option? Otherwise I'm left wondering if the Vivaldi tech preview works on XP. I'm kind of hoping Vivaldi manages to become a proper browser. I'm not really happy with modern browsers.
Windows 10 is being unleashed upon the world. And the launch can thus far be summed up as "Windows 10: Something Happened". If you don't know what I mean by that try google. It's funny stuff.
On the hardware front Intel will have Skylake coming up. Leaked benchmarks don't seem to promise too much spectacular. Early rumours were painting this is another Sandy Bridge or even a Conroe, but I was pretty skeptical of those claims and I'll say it'll be more of a Haswell at best. Also Intel's 10nm is delayed to 2017 (my long standing prediction pegged it as "mid 2017" and it's looking like I may turn out right about that).
AMD has been particularly sad to watch as they are failing as ever on the CPU front and getting beat down on the GPU side too. They made a valiant effort with the Radeon Fury, but their fancy new HBM does not seem to be the tiny god they need to take down Nvidia's Titan.
Still, AMD has a lot lined up for 2016 as the world + dog of silicon chips will probably be migrating from the very long in tooth 28nm TSMC process to various 14/16nm processes and that most certainly includes AMD. The 14/16nm processes may basically just be more like "20nm but less shitty this time we promise!" in truth and likely won't be at level with Intel's current 14nm, but hey it beats being stuck on the aging 28nm! Especially since it finally will bring much needed finFETs that Intel's had since 22nm, so yay! Almost-parody with Intel for maybe a whole year in manufacturing!
So with that AMD will be bringing their new Zen CPU architecture AND Greenland, a major GPU architecture update. Zen is a bit of a mystery but my prediction places it as roughly having similar speeds clock-for-clock as Intel's Ivy Bridge which...isn't that great in a world filled with Sky Lake, but it's much better than they've had in some time. Who knows, maybe it'll be better than that! Word on Greenland is it will be aiming for a major efficiency boost much as Nvidia pulled with Maxwell which pleases me to hear. I like efficient things.
For Nvidia's part people are unsurprisingly predicting that their Pascal architecture of next year will be super-awesome-good and maybe it will be. Maxwell has be quite excellent.
In any case with Windows 10 (yes I'm coming back to that) out NOW it brings us directX 12. With that we get a new low-overhead graphics API with significantly better multi-threading support. Some silly folks may thing this will be a big boon to AMD's graphics cards in particular but from my standpoint there doesn't seem to be any real evidence to support that. If it helps AMD I'd think it could be helpful for Nvidia too. The REAL deal is the low overhead part combined with the increased threading. That means less need for fast cpu cores and more need for MORE cpu cores. THAT is where eventual adoption of native dx12 in games would help AMD's case. If those Zen's aren't quite up to snuff per core, AMD can still try to sell you more cores per dollar and provide something relevant there. I may be looking to go through a major new computer build as early as next year so we'll see if AMD manages to impress me. I can wait long enough to at least give them a chance at my dollars.
So yeah. Tech stuff. Still a thing for me. How are things with you?
I know nothing about all those codenames, but I guess I'll have to learn if I want to build my own computer eventually.
I'm interested in trying Windows 10, but only one of my computers has Windows 7 right now, and I don't want to risk losing it. In case 7 ends up remaining better. Windows 10's multiple desktops thing looks desirable, though. I could have one desktop for art junk, one for work junk, and one for generic junk.
I'll probably install Windows 10 on my Boot Camp partition (upgrading from Windows 7) to check it out, I've heard good things from coworkers who did the upgrade. I don't spend a great deal of time in the Windows environment but it's nice to be able to switch over every once in awhile and play the handful of PC-only Steam games in my library.
I wasn't really expecting people here to be familiar with all the code names it was mostly just a mental dump.
I haven't tried Windows 10 yet but I had figured on waiting a couple months at least to try it. The bigger challenge for me is if I can find some way to upgrade a win7 computer on a 30GB ssd with virtually zero free space. Ideally I could do what I did to upgrade from vista to 7 on that computer and install the upgrade as a fresh install to a new drive using the old OS partition as the credentials for the upgrade. Then I could upgrade ssds and retire the undersized 30GB drive.
Also, Skylake launched yesterday. Gained more than Ivy Bridge did, but less than Haswell. I'm not really all that impressed and it was shown that a newish Broadwell CPU with a 128MB DRAM cache might actually be a better processor for games in some cases even running discrete graphics. This is funny as the Broadwell was clocked noticeably lower and used less power. Granted that Broadwell only launched a couple months ago, is barely available in North America yet and would cost a little more, but still a bit funny.
When I get around to doing a new build though the platform connectivity will probably matter more to me than which specific CPU I get though. Much goes on in the undercurrents of the storage and memory industries.
Codenames are a pretty handy way of differentiating architectures. Actual product names are rarely helpful in making the actual technical capabilities of a product clear. It's a thing that bothers me and I'm happier if more people are at least aware of these codenames.
Comments
Have some nerd-funny: DOS is best OS.
What I'd like to know: does he print the manuscript right off that DOS computer and give it to the publisher that way, like a savage? Or does he have some means of saving the document to a disk, transferring it to the Internet-enabled computer, and submitting digitally? Either way, this workflow sounds like a pain in the ass both for him and his publisher.
He should probably just find a simpler text editor for the modern computer that is either missing the features he doesn't want (spellcheck and punctuation correction seem to be the standouts), or is able to disable them. Hint to George R.R. Martin: all word processors have the ability to turn those features off. You're crippling yourself unnecessarily!
Intel released Sandy Bridge in 2011. Since then we had Ivy bridge which was a slight improvement followed by Haswell, another slight improvement in terms of performance, and the Broadwell update for desktop systems may well not be seen until around September...2015. And Broadwell is unlikely to bring a significant increase in performance. So in 4 years time there won't have really been enough of a performance increase to justify an upgrade.
Remember when computers were said to be out of date by the time they reached store shelves? I miss those days. I REALLY feel a need to cheer HP on for stuff like this because current tech has blatantly been slowing its progress.
Yet, what really has me strangely interested is the new USB standard joining forces with DisplayPort. That's right, USB+Display+Power (up to 100W) over a single cable.
...of course there may be other reasons for the odd naming too.
Xbox One is still a terrible, terrible name.
And then when the Five Hundred and the Freestyle weren't selling well, they renamed them Taurus and Taurus X, defeating the purpose of the Windstar/Freestar change altogether.
I dunno, renaming things without significantly changing them is just a pet peeve of mine. Like how sports stadiums get named after companies, and then the contract runs out and they become named after different companies. Or when cities rename roads in honor of people. I'd rather they just wait until it's time to build a new road, and then name that one after somebody.
Actually, no. It's less like what Ford did and more like what Lincoln is doing now. Lately they've got this awful naming scheme in which they don't even use names. Their current lineup consists of the MKS, MKZ, MKX, MKT, MKC, and... Navigator.
A Geforce 8800 GT became a Geforce 9800 GT, A Geforce 9800 GTX was a slightly overclocked Geforce 8800 GTS. A Geforce 9800+ was renamed to a Geforce GTS 250.
My Radeon 5770 had been rebranded as a Radeon 6770.
Nvidia's Geforce 750 is actually the same new generation of hardware as the Geforce 970 and 980 that just came out (Maxwell), while the Gefoce 760 and 770 are rebranded 680 and 670 cards.
Don't get me started on various bottom-end graphics cards that would get rebranded 3-5 times before they die off for good...
I should rant about other stuff at some point. With OpenGL getting repalced and DirectX12 coming stuff is happening...
The IE6 that it starts off with has always been awful, but now it flat-out refuses to load a lot of pages, especially HTTPS ones which are becoming more and more common. Last month Microsoft would've automatically upgraded me to IE8, but now that XP support is discontinued, Windows Update doesn't function anymore. You can still manually download updates from Microsoft's website, except... Microsoft blocks you from using it because the browser's too old. Firefox 3.6.28, the last version compatible with Windows XP, has also become scarce. Had to go through a few sites to find a working download link.
Ah well, it's still sorta fun. Messing around with outdated computers has been kind of a hobby of mine this year. I'm learning about working on and upgrading PCs. Maybe one day I can turn them into the world's least-efficient render farm.
I guess I had my fun with old computers back in high school hanging out with my one friend who had tons of old computer parts and generally just cobbled a bunch of old parts together to make working computers. Have a couple friends over? Piece together a couple more rigs and load up some Diablo for fun times.
Now I prefer to think more about the future of hardware. Windows 10...Intel Skylake and Cannonlake processors...AMD's Zen...PCIe ssds using M.2 connectors or maybe sata express, USB 3.1 with the new type C connector, Monitors that support variable refresh rates...the upcoming releases for DirectX 12 and Vulkan...In the nearer term I'm really curious to see how AMD's upcoming Fiji GPU fares with its fancy HBM goodness.
Also I'm impatient for 14/16nm to become a thing for more than just Intel. 20nm seems to have been the black sheep most just left to Apple so most companies are still building on 28nm.
Also, it turns out I was wrong about automatic updates no longer working with XP... that computer was just set up to wait until the middle of the night to check for them. And I found out about this unofficial "Service Pack 4" you can install that contains a bunch of previous security updates, and also messes with the registry to make Microsoft think your computer is an ATM or cash register. Those machines are supported with security updates through 2019.
https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/95346
Turns out that there is also an XP-compatible build of my browser of choice, Pale Moon. It's basically just Firefox but without all the user-unfriendly changes they've been making over the past couple years. Oddly, it only runs on one of the two XP computers I have sitting around. The other one will just have to stick with Firefox, then.
Windows 10 is being unleashed upon the world. And the launch can thus far be summed up as "Windows 10: Something Happened". If you don't know what I mean by that try google. It's funny stuff.
On the hardware front Intel will have Skylake coming up. Leaked benchmarks don't seem to promise too much spectacular. Early rumours were painting this is another Sandy Bridge or even a Conroe, but I was pretty skeptical of those claims and I'll say it'll be more of a Haswell at best. Also Intel's 10nm is delayed to 2017 (my long standing prediction pegged it as "mid 2017" and it's looking like I may turn out right about that).
AMD has been particularly sad to watch as they are failing as ever on the CPU front and getting beat down on the GPU side too. They made a valiant effort with the Radeon Fury, but their fancy new HBM does not seem to be the tiny god they need to take down Nvidia's Titan.
Still, AMD has a lot lined up for 2016 as the world + dog of silicon chips will probably be migrating from the very long in tooth 28nm TSMC process to various 14/16nm processes and that most certainly includes AMD. The 14/16nm processes may basically just be more like "20nm but less shitty this time we promise!" in truth and likely won't be at level with Intel's current 14nm, but hey it beats being stuck on the aging 28nm! Especially since it finally will bring much needed finFETs that Intel's had since 22nm, so yay! Almost-parody with Intel for maybe a whole year in manufacturing!
So with that AMD will be bringing their new Zen CPU architecture AND Greenland, a major GPU architecture update. Zen is a bit of a mystery but my prediction places it as roughly having similar speeds clock-for-clock as Intel's Ivy Bridge which...isn't that great in a world filled with Sky Lake, but it's much better than they've had in some time. Who knows, maybe it'll be better than that! Word on Greenland is it will be aiming for a major efficiency boost much as Nvidia pulled with Maxwell which pleases me to hear. I like efficient things.
For Nvidia's part people are unsurprisingly predicting that their Pascal architecture of next year will be super-awesome-good and maybe it will be. Maxwell has be quite excellent.
In any case with Windows 10 (yes I'm coming back to that) out NOW it brings us directX 12. With that we get a new low-overhead graphics API with significantly better multi-threading support. Some silly folks may thing this will be a big boon to AMD's graphics cards in particular but from my standpoint there doesn't seem to be any real evidence to support that. If it helps AMD I'd think it could be helpful for Nvidia too. The REAL deal is the low overhead part combined with the increased threading. That means less need for fast cpu cores and more need for MORE cpu cores. THAT is where eventual adoption of native dx12 in games would help AMD's case. If those Zen's aren't quite up to snuff per core, AMD can still try to sell you more cores per dollar and provide something relevant there. I may be looking to go through a major new computer build as early as next year so we'll see if AMD manages to impress me. I can wait long enough to at least give them a chance at my dollars.
So yeah. Tech stuff. Still a thing for me. How are things with you?
I'm interested in trying Windows 10, but only one of my computers has Windows 7 right now, and I don't want to risk losing it. In case 7 ends up remaining better. Windows 10's multiple desktops thing looks desirable, though. I could have one desktop for art junk, one for work junk, and one for generic junk.
I haven't tried Windows 10 yet but I had figured on waiting a couple months at least to try it. The bigger challenge for me is if I can find some way to upgrade a win7 computer on a 30GB ssd with virtually zero free space. Ideally I could do what I did to upgrade from vista to 7 on that computer and install the upgrade as a fresh install to a new drive using the old OS partition as the credentials for the upgrade. Then I could upgrade ssds and retire the undersized 30GB drive.
Also, Skylake launched yesterday. Gained more than Ivy Bridge did, but less than Haswell. I'm not really all that impressed and it was shown that a newish Broadwell CPU with a 128MB DRAM cache might actually be a better processor for games in some cases even running discrete graphics. This is funny as the Broadwell was clocked noticeably lower and used less power. Granted that Broadwell only launched a couple months ago, is barely available in North America yet and would cost a little more, but still a bit funny.
When I get around to doing a new build though the platform connectivity will probably matter more to me than which specific CPU I get though. Much goes on in the undercurrents of the storage and memory industries.