"Describing the same idea (eg: an algorithm) using different words (eg: a different programming language) often better exposes subtle problems with it."
What if you also make mistakes while describing? Describing something in different ways works if you're explaining an idea to someone, but does it help when you need to be precise? Scenario: in one person's representation, something is a syntax error because the chosen representation/syntax is more strict and rigid (for error detection purposes), whereas in another person's representation there may not be an analogous way to generate such an error.
In order to share code and learn/fix code from others, people would also have to share their representation/translation files. People would also have to debug representation/translation files. And they may have to debug those nearly alone if they are the only ones using those representations.
"not all the world's programmers speak English as their first language, yet most are _forced_ to learn it to code. This would help people code in their native language."
Even though a programming language's tokens are in English does not make it English. For example: the concept of an "OR" in most programming languages means something quite different from what it does in English.
An analogy: people could build their own network standard instead of TCP/IP and run their own networks with translations in between the two, but most people seem to have preferred to standardize (don't see many new DECNET, Banyan, IPX installations). If you use your own standard if you have problems, people can help you with the big picture problems, but you're often on your own with the details.
Maybe an address at networksolutions.com or netsol.com would be more appropriate, after all they want to be the destination for traffic to nonexistent domain names with their sitefinder crap.
Intel's segmented memory isn't a sign of evilness. I don't see much malice in that. Incompetence maybe, or just lack of foresight.
Intel doesn't seem to have such great CPU designers (they did start to get better with the 486 onwards. Still...), but they seem to have very good process and fab engineers.
Nah. Cisco has a large marketshare. And there sure isn't as much negative feeling about it. Sure their products aren't really that great and all that, but they don't resort to as many underhanded tactics as MS.
There are other large dominant companies who don't create as much bad feeling especially amongst people who really KNOW the companies.
Even Intel doesn't play as dirty as Microsoft - which is why Intel doesn't get as much attention from the antitrust people. In fact Intel has guidelines for its employees so that they are less likely to fall foul of the antitrust ppl.
e.g. "Don't, without ILT pre-approval:
1. Refuse to deal with or re-license an existing customer (particularly in Europe); 2. Limit to whom, where or from what locations customers can resell products bought from Intel; 3. Require any customer or supplier not to deal with another maker of similar products, or require any customer to buy all or nearly all such products from Intel; 4. Require customers to purchase the full line of any type of products offered by Intel. "
I suppose ILT = Intel Legal Team?
Even if Intel isn't loved by so many, it isn't really hated by people. Sure they're tough and maybe ruthless, but hey that's business. That's like getting a hard but legal tackle on the field. Sure you don't like it, but it's legal.
But MS's astroturfing, IP theft when they think they can get away with it, they're like one of those sports people who play dirty _everytime_ they think the referee isn't looking, or if they think it's worth risking going to the sin bin for, or being yellow carded or whatever.
Thing is, is it really necessary for them to do all that? MS Office is actually quite decent compared to the other competitors. They have lots of smart people in their organization, just do the technical and marketing stuff well, and skip the dirty tricks.
Don't ask me to list down all the dirty stuff MS did. There are so many - intentionally breaking MSN for opera, gathering info on other software for Windows 95's registration wizard, DR DOS, Stac Technologies. Many more - just do a search on microsoft and dirty tricks or something like that. If you really knew what Microsoft did, it'll seem like they really operate differently from most other companies. Almost as if dirty tricks are the rule and not the exception for them.
There's a difference between software and hardware.
They are still supporting windows 2000. Whether it's 1,000,000 w2k users or 1,000,004 it doesn't really matter.
It's not like cars where they have to stock replacement parts. Making another copy of a patch or hotfix costs MS very little.
Once they stop supporting W2K then sure that's different.
This is why I don't think software and similar stuff should be treated like property at all. Artificial scarcity. Copyrights should last a lot shorter than decades, maybe 7 years or even 5 years.
If software makers had to compete against themselves (older versions), then we might see more genuine innovation, instead of paper clips riding bicycles and other stupid stuff.
"Take the URI file:///c:/windows/system32/mspaint.exe Type it into the Address bar of IE - it works. Toss it into a webpage on the local machine and click on it - it works"
Doesn't work on mine. I see VERY few good reasons to need to be able to launch/download applications (or download fonts and run active script etc) from a local html page and thus I have disabled those options in the My Computer zone. I've also set things up so that copying and pasting gives me a prompt too.
Change the Flags to 1 in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\C urre ntVersion\Internet Settings\Zones\0
And the My Computer zone becomes configurable.
However do note that windows explorer seems to rely on activex or active scripting IF you are not using the classic view.
"they didn't realise at that point that this could be launched without user interaction, that "
Right, which is why I should trust software written by such developers?
They're just as crap as the IE developers, so why should people bother migrating from the defacto standard. And since I do know how to secure IE, most of the IE security bugs won't even affect me.
For many years Netscape was neck to neck with IE in the race to be the buggiest most insecure browser. It looks like the same developers are coding Mozilla and they have learned very little. In fact when they started with Mozilla they bloated it out - bloat was part of the plan. As proof there were plenty of people release stripped down browsers using the mozilla rendering engine.
I gave up on mozilla because it was bloated, and despite all that bloat it still wasn't really that functional - they must have been too busy making it infinitely skinnable or something else more "important".
"If you were able to run Windows with real restricted user accounts, this wouldn't really be such a problem."
Uh I'm doing that, and my IE is launched under a separate and even more restricted user account.
Just because lots of windows users run as "root" doesn't mean windows sucks. If Desktop Linux was ready, the same windows users who run as "administrator" would be running everything as root.
Windows sucks because: 1) It doesn't allow you to delete/unlink/rename files that are in use.
This makes reboots more common, and interruptions in service more noticeable. You have to stop a program before you can overwrite the files it uses, and then restart it. Whereas with unix you often can just move/rename files, copy new files over (while the service is still running), restart service.
2) It's hard to turn off all network services and have reasonably functioning system.
This makes it hard to lock it down.
3) Their style of doing things often requires you to run each major MS service on its OWN SEPARATE server - see MS's recommendation for a typical active directory setup.
4) The NTFS filesystem is prone to fragmentation - esp if you have files that grow little by little.
5) It sucks at forks. So many programs use threads even if they don't need it. Threaded apps are often less robust because of the shared space.
HP's concept is: HP/UX, VMS, Windows 2003, Tandem Nonstop all on Itanium. They've kinda done it. It's just whether enough people will buy it.
I'm not sure why they didn't just port all the stuff to the x86, and request Intel to add special features to their server class CPUs for high availability (e.g. allow CPUs and systems to more easily run in "lockstep" and deal with situations when it's not in lockstep).
I regularly deal with things that go wrong, so it's not such a deep point:). It's not just the code that could go wrong- there are so many things that could go wrong and I'm sure they will.
For example, say I create a "syntax configuration file" or whatever that sets up my representation. But I screw up, and though in my fallible _mind_ I think the syntax should be ABC, the syntax configuration file does BAC in some cases. Whoopee - is it a bug in my syntax conf file or a bug in my program, or a bug in the open source program parsing the syntax conf file and generating the representation, or they're all buggy, it's a bug in somewhere else!
Now who's going to be the kind person who _can_ and _will_ help me? Maybe my chosen representation is really crappy according to everyone else! Next thing you know, I post to a discussion group for representation recommendations and start something worse than a vi vs emacs war...;)
In the end, I'd probably resort to using and learning some programming genius's representation. Which brings us back to conventional programming languages and their conventional representations. Being conventional ain't so bad in the end...
OK I'm being a bit negative, but like I said, everyday I deal with things that go wrong - (I'm in the IT security line). Often 95% of the people out there don't even notice that stuff is going wrong, or they just click OK and go on with their rose tinted lives (and they won't even REMEMBER clicking OK). Whereas I go - "whoa remote attacker can execute arbitrary code of the attacker's choice!", or whoops "SQL injection".
There are plenty of things that go right too, despite all the imperfections. So feel free to ignore me - it might actually work well. But you may wish to give it some more thought - no matter what there are bound to be limits in the multi representation thingy - even if they're not hard limits - you'll always end up with making some things easier to do than others. The genius is in picking the right things to make easier and the right things to make harder.
Having infinite possibilities is nice, but often to really get anywhere you need rules and restrictions, especially if it's not just you and there are other entities involved.
Limits are a necessary part of what makes games fun:).
I like the $ coz I use the <<"EOT"; stuff a lot. e.g. print <<"ENDHTML"; <html> <head><title>$title</title> </head> <body> Unquoted:<b>$blah</b><br> Quote d: ${\( htmlquotearray($blah) )} </body> </html> ENDHTML
Witho ut the $ or other special character this would be very difficult. Not sure how you'd do that sort of thing in other languages.
In addition to the associative arrays, I like CPAN - as you mentioned, there are plenty of experts around who produce better code, and with CPAN I get to reuse their work, thus raising the average code quality of my programs AND reducing the amount of work I do;).
If I did that, no one would be able to help me if I get something wrong - e.g. I screwed up in my custom syntax or metadata or my code, and I'm not sure where.
And it would be harder for me to learn from other programmers programs and integrate their code.
Ultrageniuses and Uber Programmers are free to write their whole entire universe of code, but I bet crappy programmers like me will still stick to using what tons of people are using, and reusing other people's work (e.g. CPAN) and learning from _their_mistakes_.
Life is too short to only learn from your own mistakes.
"When was the last time these people even considered changing their computer to 256-colour mode?"
Heh, if they're the typical bunch using Win9x, they're probably still stuck with 640x480 with 256 colours, or even 16 colours, at 60Hz, on a 17inch or even 19inch monitor:).
You obviously don't get it. Even though it's 256 colours only, nearly all image capable browsers support it, though it may look a tad small for some people with certain 1600x1200x32 screens. Using GIF means catering for everyone, whereas using PNG alpha transparency means catering for 10% and causing 90% to need something different.
Also when you need line art or animated stuff, it's a good choice - your animations will even work on browsers that don't support flash and other stuff.
Not necessarily. Women who don't get pregnant do live fairly long too. Some studies do indicate they're more prone to ovarian cancers, but that may be because having too many periods is not so good for health (counterproductive one might say;) ).
Also the stem cells are there, but they may be a cause or contributing factor to the disease. Perhaps the woman's immune system has been "detuned" to not kill those stem cells, and because of that detuning it's not so good at killing diseased cells (malignant/nonmalignant tumours, malfunctioning cells).
My guess is it's just not so simple - a case of you win some, you lose some, e.g. if the stem cells are good/compatible you win overall, if they aren't, you lose. You could even lose pretty bad.
So ladies, pick your breeding partners very carefully;).
I wonder which scientists are going to do long-term studies on "Long-term health effects on human females breeding with multiple partners of disparate DNA"...
I've wondered if that may be one of the reasons why some couples start looking more and more like each other.
The "two become one flesh" thing might be a bit more literal than some people might think. Using ones sense of smell to help choose a mate might be useful in getting a better genetic match - of course that's assuming you don't have artificial hormones and scents screwing things up. Some women's cycles cause them to flip from one preference (more similar genes) to another (more different) though...
Not sure what happens if a woman has children from many different men. Wonder how her immune system would handle the fetal cells with so many variations of DNA.
Run 50 or more virtual machines in each machine. Run a etherape on one, run one of those hacker "demos" on another, run one with MS Office with clippy, run MAME32 with Pacman on another, all the various versions of Windows, DOS, various Linux distros, various *BSD, QNX and so on. Just click on each vmware tab one by one.
Hope you have enough RAM, CPU and disk.
Another alternative is Citrix. Let 100 different users use different applications all off one server. But the trouble with this is, the suits may think the stuff is running on the client and not the server.
Alternatively you can run any of those popular hardware benchmarks - e.g. SPEC or webbench or whatever that's relevant.
The movie studio executives are either really out of touch with their viewers, or they have an agenda to push which has not so much to do with making pots of money - maybe it's trying to ram _their_ viewpoints and morals down the audience throats.
Pixar knows how to make a movie which sells. They don't seem to need as much sex and violence do they? The kids want to see it, the parents agree it's fine, and voila 4-5 seats filled. Next thing you know all the kids classmates want to see it too.
But no, they want to be arty farty.
And for some stupid reason they want to waste hundreds of millions on Kevin Costner movies... Which of them was good? Dances with Wolves sure wasn't good - the people in the US just watched it coz it was a guilt trip.
Slashdot Mirror
"Describing the same idea (eg: an algorithm) using different words (eg: a different programming language) often better exposes subtle problems with it."
What if you also make mistakes while describing? Describing something in different ways works if you're explaining an idea to someone, but does it help when you need to be precise? Scenario: in one person's representation, something is a syntax error because the chosen representation/syntax is more strict and rigid (for error detection purposes), whereas in another person's representation there may not be an analogous way to generate such an error.
See my other post
In order to share code and learn/fix code from others, people would also have to share their representation/translation files. People would also have to debug representation/translation files. And they may have to debug those nearly alone if they are the only ones using those representations.
"not all the world's programmers speak English as their first language, yet most are _forced_ to learn it to code. This would help people code in their native language."
Even though a programming language's tokens are in English does not make it English. For example: the concept of an "OR" in most programming languages means something quite different from what it does in English.
An analogy: people could build their own network standard instead of TCP/IP and run their own networks with translations in between the two, but most people seem to have preferred to standardize (don't see many new DECNET, Banyan, IPX installations). If you use your own standard if you have problems, people can help you with the big picture problems, but you're often on your own with the details.
Maybe an address at networksolutions.com or netsol.com would be more appropriate, after all they want to be the destination for traffic to nonexistent domain names with their sitefinder crap.
Intel's segmented memory isn't a sign of evilness. I don't see much malice in that. Incompetence maybe, or just lack of foresight.
Intel doesn't seem to have such great CPU designers (they did start to get better with the 486 onwards. Still...), but they seem to have very good process and fab engineers.
Nah. Cisco has a large marketshare. And there sure isn't as much negative feeling about it. Sure their products aren't really that great and all that, but they don't resort to as many underhanded tactics as MS.
There are other large dominant companies who don't create as much bad feeling especially amongst people who really KNOW the companies.
Even Intel doesn't play as dirty as Microsoft - which is why Intel doesn't get as much attention from the antitrust people. In fact Intel has guidelines for its employees so that they are less likely to fall foul of the antitrust ppl.
e.g.
"Don't, without ILT pre-approval:
1. Refuse to deal with or re-license an existing customer (particularly in Europe);
2. Limit to whom, where or from what locations customers can resell products bought from Intel;
3. Require any customer or supplier not to deal with another maker of similar products, or require any customer to buy all or nearly all such products from Intel;
4. Require customers to purchase the full line of any type of products offered by Intel. "
I suppose ILT = Intel Legal Team?
Even if Intel isn't loved by so many, it isn't really hated by people. Sure they're tough and maybe ruthless, but hey that's business. That's like getting a hard but legal tackle on the field. Sure you don't like it, but it's legal.
But MS's astroturfing, IP theft when they think they can get away with it, they're like one of those sports people who play dirty _everytime_ they think the referee isn't looking, or if they think it's worth risking going to the sin bin for, or being yellow carded or whatever.
Thing is, is it really necessary for them to do all that? MS Office is actually quite decent compared to the other competitors. They have lots of smart people in their organization, just do the technical and marketing stuff well, and skip the dirty tricks.
Don't ask me to list down all the dirty stuff MS did. There are so many - intentionally breaking MSN for opera, gathering info on other software for Windows 95's registration wizard, DR DOS, Stac Technologies. Many more - just do a search on microsoft and dirty tricks or something like that. If you really knew what Microsoft did, it'll seem like they really operate differently from most other companies. Almost as if dirty tricks are the rule and not the exception for them.
I doubt Coca Cola is hated that much, if at all.
There's a difference between software and hardware.
They are still supporting windows 2000. Whether it's 1,000,000 w2k users or 1,000,004 it doesn't really matter.
It's not like cars where they have to stock replacement parts. Making another copy of a patch or hotfix costs MS very little.
Once they stop supporting W2K then sure that's different.
This is why I don't think software and similar stuff should be treated like property at all. Artificial scarcity. Copyrights should last a lot shorter than decades, maybe 7 years or even 5 years.
If software makers had to compete against themselves (older versions), then we might see more genuine innovation, instead of paper clips riding bicycles and other stupid stuff.
"Take the URI file:///c:/windows/system32/mspaint.exe Type it into the Address bar of IE - it works. Toss it into a webpage on the local machine and click on it - it works"
C urre ntVersion\Internet Settings\Zones\0
Doesn't work on mine. I see VERY few good reasons to need to be able to launch/download applications (or download fonts and run active script etc) from a local html page and thus I have disabled those options in the My Computer zone. I've also set things up so that copying and pasting gives me a prompt too.
Change the Flags to 1 in
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\
And the My Computer zone becomes configurable.
However do note that windows explorer seems to rely on activex or active scripting IF you are not using the classic view.
"they didn't realise at that point that this could be launched without user interaction, that "
Right, which is why I should trust software written by such developers?
They're just as crap as the IE developers, so why should people bother migrating from the defacto standard. And since I do know how to secure IE, most of the IE security bugs won't even affect me.
For many years Netscape was neck to neck with IE in the race to be the buggiest most insecure browser. It looks like the same developers are coding Mozilla and they have learned very little. In fact when they started with Mozilla they bloated it out - bloat was part of the plan. As proof there were plenty of people release stripped down browsers using the mozilla rendering engine.
I gave up on mozilla because it was bloated, and despite all that bloat it still wasn't really that functional - they must have been too busy making it infinitely skinnable or something else more "important".
Don't bother, it's already been done for you :).
They could have always made it a configurable option and made it secure by default. But no.
Probably the very same people who wrote Netscape are still writing Mozilla.
"If you were able to run Windows with real restricted user accounts, this wouldn't really be such a problem."
Uh I'm doing that, and my IE is launched under a separate and even more restricted user account.
Just because lots of windows users run as "root" doesn't mean windows sucks. If Desktop Linux was ready, the same windows users who run as "administrator" would be running everything as root.
Windows sucks because:
1) It doesn't allow you to delete/unlink/rename files that are in use.
This makes reboots more common, and interruptions in service more noticeable. You have to stop a program before you can overwrite the files it uses, and then restart it. Whereas with unix you often can just move/rename files, copy new files over (while the service is still running), restart service.
2) It's hard to turn off all network services and have reasonably functioning system.
This makes it hard to lock it down.
3) Their style of doing things often requires you to run each major MS service on its OWN SEPARATE server - see MS's recommendation for a typical active directory setup.
4) The NTFS filesystem is prone to fragmentation - esp if you have files that grow little by little.
5) It sucks at forks. So many programs use threads even if they don't need it. Threaded apps are often less robust because of the shared space.
Other than that, it's not that bad.
Fewer cars = fewer highways = less interconnectivity between populations.
HP's concept is: HP/UX, VMS, Windows 2003, Tandem Nonstop all on Itanium. They've kinda done it. It's just whether enough people will buy it.
I'm not sure why they didn't just port all the stuff to the x86, and request Intel to add special features to their server class CPUs for high availability (e.g. allow CPUs and systems to more easily run in "lockstep" and deal with situations when it's not in lockstep).
Y'know, in many card tricks, the people don't really pick their cards, the magician does.
But that doesn't stop the dumber folks from thinking they actually have a choice...
I regularly deal with things that go wrong, so it's not such a deep point :). It's not just the code that could go wrong- there are so many things that could go wrong and I'm sure they will.
;)
:).
For example, say I create a "syntax configuration file" or whatever that sets up my representation. But I screw up, and though in my fallible _mind_ I think the syntax should be ABC, the syntax configuration file does BAC in some cases. Whoopee - is it a bug in my syntax conf file or a bug in my program, or a bug in the open source program parsing the syntax conf file and generating the representation, or they're all buggy, it's a bug in somewhere else!
Now who's going to be the kind person who _can_ and _will_ help me? Maybe my chosen representation is really crappy according to everyone else! Next thing you know, I post to a discussion group for representation recommendations and start something worse than a vi vs emacs war...
In the end, I'd probably resort to using and learning some programming genius's representation. Which brings us back to conventional programming languages and their conventional representations. Being conventional ain't so bad in the end...
OK I'm being a bit negative, but like I said, everyday I deal with things that go wrong - (I'm in the IT security line). Often 95% of the people out there don't even notice that stuff is going wrong, or they just click OK and go on with their rose tinted lives (and they won't even REMEMBER clicking OK). Whereas I go - "whoa remote attacker can execute arbitrary code of the attacker's choice!", or whoops "SQL injection".
There are plenty of things that go right too, despite all the imperfections. So feel free to ignore me - it might actually work well. But you may wish to give it some more thought - no matter what there are bound to be limits in the multi representation thingy - even if they're not hard limits - you'll always end up with making some things easier to do than others. The genius is in picking the right things to make easier and the right things to make harder.
Having infinite possibilities is nice, but often to really get anywhere you need rules and restrictions, especially if it's not just you and there are other entities involved.
Limits are a necessary part of what makes games fun
I like the $ coz I use the <<"EOT"; stuff a lot.
;).
e.g.
print <<"ENDHTML";
<html>
<head><title>$title</title>
</head>
<body>
Unquoted:<b>$blah</b><br>
Quote d: ${\( htmlquotearray($blah) )}
</body>
</html>
ENDHTML
Witho ut the $ or other special character this would be very difficult. Not sure how you'd do that sort of thing in other languages.
In addition to the associative arrays, I like CPAN - as you mentioned, there are plenty of experts around who produce better code, and with CPAN I get to reuse their work, thus raising the average code quality of my programs AND reducing the amount of work I do
So that a remote attacker can cause a system to run arbitrary code of the attacker's choice.
:).
Very useful when you need to do things that the system was never designed to do.
Whole industries and many thousands of jobs depend on such useful ideas.
If I did that, no one would be able to help me if I get something wrong - e.g. I screwed up in my custom syntax or metadata or my code, and I'm not sure where.
And it would be harder for me to learn from other programmers programs and integrate their code.
Ultrageniuses and Uber Programmers are free to write their whole entire universe of code, but I bet crappy programmers like me will still stick to using what tons of people are using, and reusing other people's work (e.g. CPAN) and learning from _their_mistakes_.
Life is too short to only learn from your own mistakes.
Coz they were thinking using other parts of their bodies, perhaps being influenced by physical aspects of certain librarians?
Or they were just being subconsciously honest...
The Prof was smart tho. Wonder if the prof failed people who couldn't figure out a way to request for the book reasonably unambiguously.
"When was the last time these people even considered changing their computer to 256-colour mode?"
:).
Heh, if they're the typical bunch using Win9x, they're probably still stuck with 640x480 with 256 colours, or even 16 colours, at 60Hz, on a 17inch or even 19inch monitor
You obviously don't get it. Even though it's 256 colours only, nearly all image capable browsers support it, though it may look a tad small for some people with certain 1600x1200x32 screens. Using GIF means catering for everyone, whereas using PNG alpha transparency means catering for 10% and causing 90% to need something different.
Also when you need line art or animated stuff, it's a good choice - your animations will even work on browsers that don't support flash and other stuff.
Not necessarily. Women who don't get pregnant do live fairly long too. Some studies do indicate they're more prone to ovarian cancers, but that may be because having too many periods is not so good for health (counterproductive one might say ;) ).
;).
Also the stem cells are there, but they may be a cause or contributing factor to the disease. Perhaps the woman's immune system has been "detuned" to not kill those stem cells, and because of that detuning it's not so good at killing diseased cells (malignant/nonmalignant tumours, malfunctioning cells).
My guess is it's just not so simple - a case of you win some, you lose some, e.g. if the stem cells are good/compatible you win overall, if they aren't, you lose. You could even lose pretty bad.
So ladies, pick your breeding partners very carefully
I wonder which scientists are going to do long-term studies on "Long-term health effects on human females breeding with multiple partners of disparate DNA"...
I've wondered if that may be one of the reasons why some couples start looking more and more like each other.
The "two become one flesh" thing might be a bit more literal than some people might think. Using ones sense of smell to help choose a mate might be useful in getting a better genetic match - of course that's assuming you don't have artificial hormones and scents screwing things up. Some women's cycles cause them to flip from one preference (more similar genes) to another (more different) though...
Not sure what happens if a woman has children from many different men. Wonder how her immune system would handle the fetal cells with so many variations of DNA.
On a vaguely related note: human chimeras. Mosaicism and Chimerism.
GIFs work on practically all browsers that support images. Elsewhere in the world the GIF patents may not apply.
If _your_country_ is patent encumbered, I don't see it as a problem with the technology, I see it as a problem with your country.
Oh yah, if you are doing the vmware thing, don't forget to run a few instances of cluster knoppix - e.g. have a 10 machine cluster in one machine.
:)
Or erm, run a "beowulf" cluster in one machine.
Run 50 or more virtual machines in each machine. Run a etherape on one, run one of those hacker "demos" on another, run one with MS Office with clippy, run MAME32 with Pacman on another, all the various versions of Windows, DOS, various Linux distros, various *BSD, QNX and so on. Just click on each vmware tab one by one.
Hope you have enough RAM, CPU and disk.
Another alternative is Citrix. Let 100 different users use different applications all off one server. But the trouble with this is, the suits may think the stuff is running on the client and not the server.
Alternatively you can run any of those popular hardware benchmarks - e.g. SPEC or webbench or whatever that's relevant.
The movie studio executives are either really out of touch with their viewers, or they have an agenda to push which has not so much to do with making pots of money - maybe it's trying to ram _their_ viewpoints and morals down the audience throats.
Pixar knows how to make a movie which sells. They don't seem to need as much sex and violence do they? The kids want to see it, the parents agree it's fine, and voila 4-5 seats filled. Next thing you know all the kids classmates want to see it too.
But no, they want to be arty farty.
And for some stupid reason they want to waste hundreds of millions on Kevin Costner movies... Which of them was good? Dances with Wolves sure wasn't good - the people in the US just watched it coz it was a guilt trip.