Patenting the obvious is against everything "innovation" stands for. You couldn't patent putting a link around an image, but suddenly a "click-through banner ad" is different? That's evil.
Or, you use cookies to save someone's information (including their credit card number) so that next time, when they come back, you know who they are. (sounds like Slashdot...) But now you call it "one-click shopping", and suddenly it's a new idea.
I know, I'll write up a patent on a system to keep track of people's inventions, but instead of a patent office, I'll call it "pure evil", and sue the USA and all other companies who use my system... --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
First, Windows 2000 *is* the most secure OS that Microsoft has ever shipped. This is a true statement, because they haven't shipped it yet. (Seen it in stores, lately? Didn't think so...)
Second, NT *might* be C2 secure if set up properly, and not hooked up to a network. Otherwise, all bets are off.
In closing, Windows is horribly insecure and badly designed. A secure NT machine is probably running in VMWare under Linux, with all patches installed for both OSes, not connected to the network, in a locked box, and under 1,000 feet of water. A machine is only as secure as it is configured to be... --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I often don't like it when journalists try to be cute, but this article was amusing.
I find it sad that no one ever draws the obvious connection, that perhaps kids with a predisposition to or fascination with violent behavior seek out violent games and TV shows. That seems to make the most sense to me.
Remember, guys, Duck Hunt doesn't kill people, angry Lt. Col.'s do. All Duck Hunk encourages is shooting that dog. And you know what? It doesn't work. He still snickers at you!
However: five of the top ten games of 1999 were Pokemon games? That's enough to make me want to shoot someone...:) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I'll believe it when I see it, but just to check, I load up fox.com. However, now I'm on a windows box.
All I wanted to do was view the source of the page, but this Shockwave stuff loads automatically and I can't stop it with the "Stop" button. Frickin' plug-ins.
"hard-hitting"... "always on"... "FOX.com"... "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down."
Oops. Maybe basic HTML *would* be a better idea.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Well, GNU Ed on my system is about 67k, while pico is 157k. But with gzexe they both compress to at least half their former size.
Still, I've seen the source code for ed, and it's pretty small:
while:;do read x;echo \?;done
Sadly, I know you're joking 'cause the last time I tried to load X in 4MB of RAM it didn't work, even with swap. (4MB total, for everything. I think 6MB might work, but I know 8MB does..) Time to start using stripped down versions of X and Linux... --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Nah, man, after reading their review, I'm switching to Slackware! They say it takes up little disk space, but read the specs they post!
4MB RAM, 20MB Disk Space, Kernel 2.2.13, KDE, GNOME, Enlightenment... Why, I bet it even has X! That's great, since the last few reviews I read forgot that Linux had a GUI like Windows. Boy, those Linux people get things done fast. I'm *amazed* they can fit that into just 20MB of Disk Space, and run in 4MB of RAM. On my machine, the Kernel can take up 2MB of RAM by itself, and X can easily take up more than 4MB! (don't even talk to me about GNOME / Enlightenment...)
(for the humor-impaired: maybe it'd be a good idea if they listed numbers for a default install, or a typical install, or whatever, because all the information they put in their "Quick Facts" is not coherent together...)
Wow, those C|Net people *sure* know how to configure their Linux boxes. Bare-bones and Unix like. Wow, who would have thought. I wonder what was so hard to use, did they make the default editor the GNOME version of ed or something? Oh well, it is the standard text editor and all... --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
First, I'd like to say that this book is probably *not* for the beginner (as in, read one of the other Perl books first, and write in it for a while, I still have to read Learning Perl sometime...)
Second, I'd like to ask why a good, pseudo-code, readable language *isn't* more popular nowadays. There are many books written like this (my Operating Systems text in school, and many of the examples, are written in something that looks like Pascal with support for multiple processes, although I've never seen such a beast) and their code is very readable.
I used to write in Turbo Pascal 7, and I enjoyed writing classes ("objects") with it. All my code was inherently pretty readable, even when I used nasty tricks, unlike my C code (or most Perl code that I've seen). Later, I did convert some of it to C and C++ with p2c and some hacking on my own, but it would be nice to maintain the readable version of the code.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I'm posting this a little late, but I hope you read this. I take offense at your "they aim to create software that even an ADHD child could use" stab. Why don't you rather say "they aim to create software that even a middle-aged adult could use"? Flawed as it is, even that might be more appropriate.
All of the characteristics of ADHD go hand in hand with the same traits that many geeks have. I don't have the slightest interest in many, many subjects, but I can focus intently on a programming task for hours. I did this when I was a child, too, and I could use many, many programs, well designed or not, better than the adults who surrounded me.
So, next time, pick a different, more appropriate group to single out, insult, and pick on, and hope they aren't listening at the time.
And computers are tools. They're for everyone. If you don't know how to use it, don't be surprised when it doesn't work. However, never let your opportunity to learn be taken away from you by people who think you shouldn't know. Like all those poor ADHD kids who can't find what they're looking for because Uncle Tom took away their computer... --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Actually, in MkLinux, it looked like the microkernel was unnecessary overhead, and I/O abstraction and bottleneck that slowed it down.
But perhaps if it were designed to use a microkernel from the start, it would look very different.
Either way, there have been variants of Linux that have run under Mach, so there certainly is a microkernel Linux of some sort or another out there. And, since NT is supposed to run under a microkernel too, I think this is just an implementation buzzword until it's done correctly.
We'll see what the HURD will bring, I've learned to expect great things from the FSF, that hopefully will be made useful for mere mortals by the rest of the community.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Actually WINE reimplements a *lot* of API calls. It's kind of scary. I'm surprised that a stripped binary is still as small as 4MB these days. (I remember when it was more like 2MB... *sigh*)
But yeah, you're right on the money there. I think it'd be harder to do for the VMWare people, (and they might have already *tried* to implement some of this) but as it stands my computer swaps on the initial "Checking memory..." stuff from the BIOS, and I don't think it ever frees any of that memory. The benefits would greatly outweigh the cost, IMO... --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
You're taking it pretty well, since it's all stupid anyhow. I get it too, for some reason.
I see about a billion AC's in this thread not marked as "Offtopic". I wonder why *you* got moderated down... Hmm.
And, for future reference, guys, my Anonymous posts don't get treated that badly. But I have seen that behavior happen before. Try posting the same thing you would have posted anyhow, anonymously. And see if anyone looks at these silly "comment" things, anyhow.:)
But more people *do* see the logged-in posts, because some people do set their threshold above 0, guys. (I usually set mine to 1, unless I see a lot of "x comments below blah threshold", or I'm really interested in the thread, but lately I've been setting mine to -1, out of moderator mistrust) And if you see a post, and you like it, you might moderate it up.
Also, there is a lot of Anonymous Coward distrust, because they offer *no* way to contact them. They are definitely more admirable when they do. Even a slashdot account is enough, and an e-mail address (anonymous or not) is a nice touch. I distrust Anonymous Cowards because they have no reason to be accountable for what they do or say, and I don't know if I'm talking to the same person. I could post anonymously to myself and make it look like I'm being harassed to get scored up. How messed up is that? If I have a discussion with someone, and I can't see a face, I'd at least like to have a name. But really intelligent commentary will do.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Alright, let me be a little more clear. You're 100% right about what DOSEmu and Wine do (although the DOSEmu people haven't released anything lately, it looks like if they do, they'll be looking into trying to trap more of the protected mode stuff, which is basically just what VMWare does too)
My problem with the RAM is this: 8MB of RAM is perfectly acceptable overhead for VMWare, but the extra 32MB (or whatever) for the virtual machine is not. It should be able to dynamically allocate that RAM, and at least return a page of 0's for any new memory that the virtual machine wants. Otherwise, it should run faster, not both. That is my problem with the RAM.
VMWare *does* *not* emulate an entire i386 machine. (Bochs and SoftWindows do, and they're much slower, for obvious reasons) If it did, they'd release it for Solaris, and make a buttload of money. VMWare *requires* an x86 machine, because it passes through a lot of the x86 assembler instructions. (wherever possible, trapping and emulating protected mode and other nasty stuff the Host OS won't let it mess with)
I don't have a problem with that, I just have a problem with the memory. And another poster commented that they make a "flat" address space that to make it easier for them. Well, that's great, and if it's actually impossible to do it well any other way, I guess we'll have to live with that. But it is an issue, and I'm not convinced that it has to be that way, yet. (I guess they'd try to do it the other way if possible. I'm sure they had their reasons, but I'll spend my time rooting for someone to implement it in DOSEmu or even FreeMWare...)
Other stuff to mention about DOSEmu and Wine:
DOSEmu has pretty video support and some initial sound support, which is cool. If Bochs was also GPL (I don't think that'll happen, but...) the two projects could merge / share code, and DOSEmu could fix their video and maybe add a little sound, while Bochs could emulate all that DOSEmu lacks, and make something fast that uses less RAM than VMWare. At least, that would be the goal. I guess DOSEmu could share code with FreeMWare, but I haven't checked the licensing.
Wine is just like the old WABI project, except it supports a lot of new stuff. However, currently it has moved away from getting the old Win 3.1 features perfect--which is okay--and focusing more on the current new features that people need for their personal "killer apps", which makes some good sense (they can't do it *all*, but it's great to see help from Corel). Also, Wine doesn't need an existing Windows installation. In that respect, they've done a lot of work, *more* than VMWare, since they've literally had to reimplement the Windows API. You said that, but I argue that that's *much* more work than even reimplementing the x86 at a low level, IMO, just due to its sheer size. (and they did some of that, too, there's interrupt code and minimal console output in Wine. (for instance, it runs PKZIP, because it has to.:)
I think that both Wine and DOSEmu have code from the TWIN project to completely emulate an x86, and they're both attempting to merge that in for cross-platform support. But we'll see if anything happens with that.
But yes, these are all 'emulation' or reimplementations in some way or another, and they are different. But they all accomplish many of the same goals, and therefore I thought it appropriate to make a comparison. Thank you for explicitly pointing out the major differences, though, you saved me some commenting.:) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Won't it just wander until it hits a power of two and then terminate?
I'm sure a formal proof would be much harder, but... that one isn't very complicated.
(if you did it backwards and described the formula you used to get that number, starting with one, it'd start getting interesting, though... Hmm.) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Don't go bashing them too much, that was pretty easy to find with the "Search" function. Usually they try to put related links in that extra box at the top, next to the story. CmdrTaco's take on reposting old stories (by mistake, this one wasn't a mistake, just an issue that Roblimo thought should be discussed again, maybe too soon...) is that there are too many stories and submissions to wade through (His estimate in Thoughts From The Furnace was around 9000)
However, if a simple search function to find old articles about the (exact) same topic before posting a new one was implemented correctly, it would be very nice. It would eliminate all of the "Didn't we already see this on Slashdot" posts, as you were saying, it could add a link to the archived version going to the new article if needed, and definitely add a link to the new article back to the old one, to let people know that we are discussing this again for a reason. And it would eliminate all posts like your own, because the problem would be solved, the new feature added, and everyone would be happy. Except for the dude who had to implement it (but he'll probably be inordinately proud of it once he's done, so that's okay).:) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I've used VMWare, and it does an excellent job of emulating an x86 environment, with better compatibility than Wine, DOSEmu, or just about anything else. That's impressive.
However, for whatever reason, it needs a lot more RAM. It has to physically allocate however much RAM you tell it to use for the emulated OS, in my case 32MB for Win '98, and then it uses at least another 8MB for its devices and itself, and somewhere in there my 64MB K6/300 decides that it hates life and gets really slow... That's why they recommend at least 128MB RAM. DOSEmu, by contrast, never uses as much RAM as I tell it it can use unless it absolutely has to. Usually I give it 8MB, but when I wanted to run Callus, I gave it 20MB. Worked great, except for lacking sound. Wine generally uses 4MB above and beyond the memory usage of the Windows app, in my experience. (these numbers are all pretty rough, if you've tested this more, please post some results)
Also, I didn't like it that VMWare didn't support more options for an x86 drive. I have a lot of ext2 partitions that I use for my DOS stuff, and DOSEmu and Wine deal with that just fine. I guess I could make some native FAT partitions, but those things are nasty. And compressed drives really are a hack, but I might do that again instead. So I've got a big file where VMWare keeps its 'OS'.
And, when all is said and done, what good is it? Well, I've found that I don't really have much of a use for Win '98, and I can run a lot of other stuff with DOSEmu or Wine. Just about the only thing I'd want VMWare for would be displaying videos with proprietary, unsupported codecs, since XAnim is missing a lot of them and the companies are pretty lame about it.
So why would I want FreeMWare? Well, to play around with it. To be able to compile it with my compiler optimizations and see how it runs. (even if the VMWare team does something like this... well, I don't know about it, and I can't test it)
To see if someone hacks in ext2 support or some kind of generic drive emulation that works well. (have the IDE/SCSI faking area, or use Linux's SCSI faking, and then have the actual drive, whether it's a disk file, a FAT partition, a DOSEmu drive, a VMWare drive, or an ext2 partition...)
I'd like to see it without the weird video corruption I get with VMWare (although my video card does suck:).
And then I'll have to test out how the native sound works in DOS, that's a must for my DOS games. And then benchmark against DOSEmu.:)
Of course, first I'd like to know how it's doing now. Has anyone built the source from CVS? I normally just download the releases, but the warning on this one indicated it was anything but stable. --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I had a book of stuff like this, called "The Trenton Pickle Ordinance".
A lot of it is either really old, or just have stupid mistakes in wording. Like the one where the two trains stop at a crossroads, "and neither shall go until the other has passed". Deadlock!:) --- pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
But if you look, you'll see many people admitting that they prefer IE to Netscape, for whatever reason. I don't get it yet, but maybe I missed something. I guess if IE were on Unix, maybe it wouldn't crash the whole operating system when it went down...
However, if it makes you feel any better, I'm browsing in w3m, because it supports letting me write this in my favorite text editor.:)
"IE for Unix" also only ran on specific versions of Solaris.
Not just 2.51 and up, but also with specific kernel patches for different SPARCs... It was really sick, and I'm not sick enough to try to get that to work. And that sounds like the same mess on HP/UX. Ugh.
However, even if you did get it to work, it still sucked. Better luck emulating an x86 entirely in software.
Pick on whomever you want. I will still defend *that* statement.
Why do we have Word Macro Viruses? I've mentioned it before. It's a simple, obvious security hole that Microsoft has never properly addressed. It's entirely their fault. Name me another Macro Scripting Language built into a word processor that can format my hard drive and spread itself over e-mail. That's like making a typewriter that can blow up a house, it's completely absurd!
Of course, the pitiful lack of security features in Windows '95/'98 only perpetuates this, but that is another good example. Why is it so difficult to secure a regular Windows box? I've mentioned this too. There are many, many ways to hack them, and it's very hard to disable all of them without losing all functionality.
Microsoft will release patches for specific things that they eventually admit are bugs, or think will get too much time in the press otherwise. But they don't fix anything if they don't have to, and the whole process is akin to using band-aids to plug leaks in a dam.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope, sorry guys, this *is* pure evil.
Patenting the obvious is against everything "innovation" stands for. You couldn't patent putting a link around an image, but suddenly a "click-through banner ad" is different? That's evil.
Or, you use cookies to save someone's information (including their credit card number) so that next time, when they come back, you know who they are. (sounds like Slashdot...) But now you call it "one-click shopping", and suddenly it's a new idea.
I know, I'll write up a patent on a system to keep track of people's inventions, but instead of a patent office, I'll call it "pure evil", and sue the USA and all other companies who use my system...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
First, Windows 2000 *is* the most secure OS that Microsoft has ever shipped. This is a true statement, because they haven't shipped it yet. (Seen it in stores, lately? Didn't think so...)
Second, NT *might* be C2 secure if set up properly, and not hooked up to a network. Otherwise, all bets are off.
In closing, Windows is horribly insecure and badly designed. A secure NT machine is probably running in VMWare under Linux, with all patches installed for both OSes, not connected to the network, in a locked box, and under 1,000 feet of water. A machine is only as secure as it is configured to be...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I often don't like it when journalists try to be cute, but this article was amusing.
:)
I find it sad that no one ever draws the obvious connection, that perhaps kids with a predisposition to or fascination with violent behavior seek out violent games and TV shows. That seems to make the most sense to me.
Remember, guys, Duck Hunt doesn't kill people, angry Lt. Col.'s do. All Duck Hunk encourages is shooting that dog. And you know what? It doesn't work. He still snickers at you!
However: five of the top ten games of 1999 were Pokemon games? That's enough to make me want to shoot someone...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I'll believe it when I see it, but just to check, I load up fox.com. However, now I'm on a windows box.
:)
All I wanted to do was view the source of the page, but this Shockwave stuff loads automatically and I can't stop it with the "Stop" button. Frickin' plug-ins.
"hard-hitting"... "always on"... "FOX.com"... "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down."
Oops. Maybe basic HTML *would* be a better idea.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Well, GNU Ed on my system is about 67k, while pico is 157k. But with gzexe they both compress to at least half their former size.
:;do read x;echo \?;done
Still, I've seen the source code for ed, and it's pretty small:
while
Sadly, I know you're joking 'cause the last time I tried to load X in 4MB of RAM it didn't work, even with swap. (4MB total, for everything. I think 6MB might work, but I know 8MB does..) Time to start using stripped down versions of X and Linux...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Nah, man, after reading their review, I'm switching to Slackware! They say it takes up little disk space, but read the specs they post!
4MB RAM, 20MB Disk Space, Kernel 2.2.13, KDE, GNOME, Enlightenment... Why, I bet it even has X! That's great, since the last few reviews I read forgot that Linux had a GUI like Windows. Boy, those Linux people get things done fast. I'm *amazed* they can fit that into just 20MB of Disk Space, and run in 4MB of RAM. On my machine, the Kernel can take up 2MB of RAM by itself, and X can easily take up more than 4MB! (don't even talk to me about GNOME / Enlightenment...)
(for the humor-impaired: maybe it'd be a good idea if they listed numbers for a default install, or a typical install, or whatever, because all the information they put in their "Quick Facts" is not coherent together...)
Wow, those C|Net people *sure* know how to configure their Linux boxes. Bare-bones and Unix like. Wow, who would have thought. I wonder what was so hard to use, did they make the default editor the GNOME version of ed or something? Oh well, it is the standard text editor and all...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I believe that the number of primes grows logarithmically. Fortunately, I found a link, too! :)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
First, I'd like to say that this book is probably *not* for the beginner (as in, read one of the other Perl books first, and write in it for a while, I still have to read Learning Perl sometime...)
:)
Second, I'd like to ask why a good, pseudo-code, readable language *isn't* more popular nowadays. There are many books written like this (my Operating Systems text in school, and many of the examples, are written in something that looks like Pascal with support for multiple processes, although I've never seen such a beast) and their code is very readable.
I used to write in Turbo Pascal 7, and I enjoyed writing classes ("objects") with it. All my code was inherently pretty readable, even when I used nasty tricks, unlike my C code (or most Perl code that I've seen). Later, I did convert some of it to C and C++ with p2c and some hacking on my own, but it would be nice to maintain the readable version of the code.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I'm posting this a little late, but I hope you read this. I take offense at your "they aim to create software that even an ADHD child could use" stab. Why don't you rather say "they aim to create software that even a middle-aged adult could use"? Flawed as it is, even that might be more appropriate.
All of the characteristics of ADHD go hand in hand with the same traits that many geeks have. I don't have the slightest interest in many, many subjects, but I can focus intently on a programming task for hours. I did this when I was a child, too, and I could use many, many programs, well designed or not, better than the adults who surrounded me.
So, next time, pick a different, more appropriate group to single out, insult, and pick on, and hope they aren't listening at the time.
And computers are tools. They're for everyone. If you don't know how to use it, don't be surprised when it doesn't work. However, never let your opportunity to learn be taken away from you by people who think you shouldn't know. Like all those poor ADHD kids who can't find what they're looking for because Uncle Tom took away their computer...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Actually, in MkLinux, it looked like the microkernel was unnecessary overhead, and I/O abstraction and bottleneck that slowed it down.
:)
But perhaps if it were designed to use a microkernel from the start, it would look very different.
Either way, there have been variants of Linux that have run under Mach, so there certainly is a microkernel Linux of some sort or another out there. And, since NT is supposed to run under a microkernel too, I think this is just an implementation buzzword until it's done correctly.
We'll see what the HURD will bring, I've learned to expect great things from the FSF, that hopefully will be made useful for mere mortals by the rest of the community.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Actually WINE reimplements a *lot* of API calls. It's kind of scary. I'm surprised that a stripped binary is still as small as 4MB these days. (I remember when it was more like 2MB... *sigh*)
But yeah, you're right on the money there. I think it'd be harder to do for the VMWare people, (and they might have already *tried* to implement some of this) but as it stands my computer swaps on the initial "Checking memory..." stuff from the BIOS, and I don't think it ever frees any of that memory. The benefits would greatly outweigh the cost, IMO...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
You're taking it pretty well, since it's all stupid anyhow. I get it too, for some reason.
:)
:)
I see about a billion AC's in this thread not marked as "Offtopic". I wonder why *you* got moderated down... Hmm.
And, for future reference, guys, my Anonymous posts don't get treated that badly. But I have seen that behavior happen before. Try posting the same thing you would have posted anyhow, anonymously. And see if anyone looks at these silly "comment" things, anyhow.
But more people *do* see the logged-in posts, because some people do set their threshold above 0, guys. (I usually set mine to 1, unless I see a lot of "x comments below blah threshold", or I'm really interested in the thread, but lately I've been setting mine to -1, out of moderator mistrust) And if you see a post, and you like it, you might moderate it up.
Also, there is a lot of Anonymous Coward distrust, because they offer *no* way to contact them. They are definitely more admirable when they do. Even a slashdot account is enough, and an e-mail address (anonymous or not) is a nice touch. I distrust Anonymous Cowards because they have no reason to be accountable for what they do or say, and I don't know if I'm talking to the same person. I could post anonymously to myself and make it look like I'm being harassed to get scored up. How messed up is that? If I have a discussion with someone, and I can't see a face, I'd at least like to have a name. But really intelligent commentary will do.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Alright, let me be a little more clear. You're 100% right about what DOSEmu and Wine do (although the DOSEmu people haven't released anything lately, it looks like if they do, they'll be looking into trying to trap more of the protected mode stuff, which is basically just what VMWare does too)
:)
:)
My problem with the RAM is this: 8MB of RAM is perfectly acceptable overhead for VMWare, but the extra 32MB (or whatever) for the virtual machine is not. It should be able to dynamically allocate that RAM, and at least return a page of 0's for any new memory that the virtual machine wants. Otherwise, it should run faster, not both. That is my problem with the RAM.
VMWare *does* *not* emulate an entire i386 machine. (Bochs and SoftWindows do, and they're much slower, for obvious reasons) If it did, they'd release it for Solaris, and make a buttload of money. VMWare *requires* an x86 machine, because it passes through a lot of the x86 assembler instructions. (wherever possible, trapping and emulating protected mode and other nasty stuff the Host OS won't let it mess with)
I don't have a problem with that, I just have a problem with the memory. And another poster commented that they make a "flat" address space that to make it easier for them. Well, that's great, and if it's actually impossible to do it well any other way, I guess we'll have to live with that. But it is an issue, and I'm not convinced that it has to be that way, yet. (I guess they'd try to do it the other way if possible. I'm sure they had their reasons, but I'll spend my time rooting for someone to implement it in DOSEmu or even FreeMWare...)
Other stuff to mention about DOSEmu and Wine:
DOSEmu has pretty video support and some initial sound support, which is cool. If Bochs was also GPL (I don't think that'll happen, but...) the two projects could merge / share code, and DOSEmu could fix their video and maybe add a little sound, while Bochs could emulate all that DOSEmu lacks, and make something fast that uses less RAM than VMWare. At least, that would be the goal. I guess DOSEmu could share code with FreeMWare, but I haven't checked the licensing.
Wine is just like the old WABI project, except it supports a lot of new stuff. However, currently it has moved away from getting the old Win 3.1 features perfect--which is okay--and focusing more on the current new features that people need for their personal "killer apps", which makes some good sense (they can't do it *all*, but it's great to see help from Corel). Also, Wine doesn't need an existing Windows installation. In that respect, they've done a lot of work, *more* than VMWare, since they've literally had to reimplement the Windows API. You said that, but I argue that that's *much* more work than even reimplementing the x86 at a low level, IMO, just due to its sheer size. (and they did some of that, too, there's interrupt code and minimal console output in Wine. (for instance, it runs PKZIP, because it has to.
I think that both Wine and DOSEmu have code from the TWIN project to completely emulate an x86, and they're both attempting to merge that in for cross-platform support. But we'll see if anything happens with that.
But yes, these are all 'emulation' or reimplementations in some way or another, and they are different. But they all accomplish many of the same goals, and therefore I thought it appropriate to make a comparison. Thank you for explicitly pointing out the major differences, though, you saved me some commenting.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Won't it just wander until it hits a power of two and then terminate?
I'm sure a formal proof would be much harder, but... that one isn't very complicated.
(if you did it backwards and described the formula you used to get that number, starting with one, it'd start getting interesting, though... Hmm.)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
You know that the NWO spells trouble...
No, but my friends who watch wrasslin' sure do. Pass me a beer, guys.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Lemme look. Yep, here it is.
:)
Don't go bashing them too much, that was pretty easy to find with the "Search" function. Usually they try to put related links in that extra box at the top, next to the story. CmdrTaco's take on reposting old stories (by mistake, this one wasn't a mistake, just an issue that Roblimo thought should be discussed again, maybe too soon...) is that there are too many stories and submissions to wade through (His estimate in Thoughts From The Furnace was around 9000)
However, if a simple search function to find old articles about the (exact) same topic before posting a new one was implemented correctly, it would be very nice. It would eliminate all of the "Didn't we already see this on Slashdot" posts, as you were saying, it could add a link to the archived version going to the new article if needed, and definitely add a link to the new article back to the old one, to let people know that we are discussing this again for a reason. And it would eliminate all posts like your own, because the problem would be solved, the new feature added, and everyone would be happy. Except for the dude who had to implement it (but he'll probably be inordinately proud of it once he's done, so that's okay).
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I've used VMWare, and it does an excellent job of emulating an x86 environment, with better compatibility than Wine, DOSEmu, or just about anything else. That's impressive.
:).
:)
However, for whatever reason, it needs a lot more RAM. It has to physically allocate however much RAM you tell it to use for the emulated OS, in my case 32MB for Win '98, and then it uses at least another 8MB for its devices and itself, and somewhere in there my 64MB K6/300 decides that it hates life and gets really slow... That's why they recommend at least 128MB RAM. DOSEmu, by contrast, never uses as much RAM as I tell it it can use unless it absolutely has to. Usually I give it 8MB, but when I wanted to run Callus, I gave it 20MB. Worked great, except for lacking sound. Wine generally uses 4MB above and beyond the memory usage of the Windows app, in my experience. (these numbers are all pretty rough, if you've tested this more, please post some results)
Also, I didn't like it that VMWare didn't support more options for an x86 drive. I have a lot of ext2 partitions that I use for my DOS stuff, and DOSEmu and Wine deal with that just fine. I guess I could make some native FAT partitions, but those things are nasty. And compressed drives really are a hack, but I might do that again instead. So I've got a big file where VMWare keeps its 'OS'.
And, when all is said and done, what good is it? Well, I've found that I don't really have much of a use for Win '98, and I can run a lot of other stuff with DOSEmu or Wine. Just about the only thing I'd want VMWare for would be displaying videos with proprietary, unsupported codecs, since XAnim is missing a lot of them and the companies are pretty lame about it.
So why would I want FreeMWare? Well, to play around with it. To be able to compile it with my compiler optimizations and see how it runs. (even if the VMWare team does something like this... well, I don't know about it, and I can't test it)
To see if someone hacks in ext2 support or some kind of generic drive emulation that works well. (have the IDE/SCSI faking area, or use Linux's SCSI faking, and then have the actual drive, whether it's a disk file, a FAT partition, a DOSEmu drive, a VMWare drive, or an ext2 partition...)
I'd like to see it without the weird video corruption I get with VMWare (although my video card does suck
And then I'll have to test out how the native sound works in DOS, that's a must for my DOS games. And then benchmark against DOSEmu.
Of course, first I'd like to know how it's doing now. Has anyone built the source from CVS? I normally just download the releases, but the warning on this one indicated it was anything but stable.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Wouldn't that be legalized *cracking*?
Someone teach the Australian gov't how to hack, so they can play nice with everyone again...
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
You're not a karma whore, my man, you have no karma.
Looked at anyone's karma lately? Try looking at mine.
These aren't the karma whores you're looking for...
Now can we all just *try* to grow up? Please?
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Looks like elm is still safe, for the foreseeable future. :P
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
There are three programs on here that got A1 ratings!
Isn't that where you need to mathematically prove your program is secure?
(or can you just bribe them with the steak sauce?)
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I had a book of stuff like this, called "The Trenton Pickle Ordinance".
:)
A lot of it is either really old, or just have stupid mistakes in wording. Like the one where the two trains stop at a crossroads, "and neither shall go until the other has passed". Deadlock!
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
I wish I were wrong on this one.
But if you look, you'll see many people admitting that they prefer IE to
Netscape, for whatever reason. I don't get it yet, but maybe I missed
something. I guess if IE were on Unix, maybe it wouldn't crash the whole
operating system when it went down...
However, if it makes you feel any better, I'm browsing in w3m, because
it supports letting me write this in my favorite text editor.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
:) That doesn't surprise me one bit.
"IE for Unix" also only ran on specific versions of Solaris.
Not just 2.51 and up, but also with specific kernel patches for different
SPARCs... It was really sick, and I'm not sick enough to try to get that
to work. And that sounds like the same mess on HP/UX. Ugh.
However, even if you did get it to work, it still sucked.
Better luck emulating an x86 entirely in software.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.
Pick on whomever you want. I will still defend *that* statement.
Why do we have Word Macro Viruses? I've mentioned it before. It's a
simple, obvious security hole that Microsoft has never properly addressed.
It's entirely their fault. Name me another Macro Scripting Language
built into a word processor that can format my hard drive and spread
itself over e-mail. That's like making a typewriter that can blow up a
house, it's completely absurd!
Of course, the pitiful lack of security features in Windows '95/'98 only
perpetuates this, but that is another good example. Why is it so
difficult to secure a regular Windows box? I've mentioned this too.
There are many, many ways to hack them, and it's very hard to disable all
of them without losing all functionality.
Microsoft will release patches for specific things that they eventually
admit are bugs, or think will get too much time in the press otherwise.
But they don't fix anything if they don't have to, and the whole process
is akin to using band-aids to plug leaks in a dam.
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pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.