security, architecture dependencies seem like a great use for virtual machine technology in distributed technologies. compiled PDP-11 libraries could run on ppc or intel. it would be slow, but interpreters for machine code could be written in java. something faster could be put together, but with more difficulty. filesystems could also be protected using java, to prevent hackers from trashing a users own data. and perhaps programs and vms themselves could be encrypted so that they become only readable at the machine level and so that the computations become pure gibberish to anything but an informed server containing decryption information. i don't know enough about encryption to know if this is technically possible. as to the other issues: i work with "industrial" problems regularly. some require large datafiles, few requre libraries > 2MB, some require a lot of communication and I/O but some will chug away for a very long time with very small datafiles and very little communication with a filesystem or other computers. if it isn't obvious already, i think this is a GREAT idea, and will work extremely well for some problems.
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the ads suck but the comparative stats look pretty good: faster, cheaper, and saves on the electric bills. why buy dell?
security, architecture dependencies seem like a great use for virtual machine technology in distributed technologies. compiled PDP-11 libraries could run on ppc or intel. it would be slow, but interpreters for machine code could be written in java. something faster could be put together, but with more difficulty. filesystems could also be protected using java, to prevent hackers from trashing a users own data. and perhaps programs and vms themselves could be encrypted so that they become only readable at the machine level and so that the computations become pure gibberish to anything but an informed server containing decryption information. i don't know enough about encryption to know if this is technically possible. as to the other issues: i work with "industrial" problems regularly. some require large datafiles, few requre libraries > 2MB, some require a lot of communication and I/O but some will chug away for a very long time with very small datafiles and very little communication with a filesystem or other computers. if it isn't obvious already, i think this is a GREAT idea, and will work extremely well for some problems.