It seems that most software for the PS2 only tries to take advantage of the hardware by making busy scenes. Populating backdrops with lots of innocent bystanders, surely makes it look interesting, but I'm sure it wouldn't add too much to the game play.
I guess we'll have to wait a little while before we see games that show some serious creativity. I'm impressed, but there's better ways of using that horsepower.:-)
Well you know, there is just a sense of joy in seeing the score rise with positive affirmation from the/. crowd. I don't want to create a new user account (I like this username:), but I like the feel a strong sense of accomplishment. Now I have to go back up again, so I will dispense bits of my meandering experience in a positive fashion again.:-) Thanks for understanding. hehehe
Btw, I honestly did think that article was bull. Consider the end of the article. He jumps from the decimation of Microsoft with the rapid acceptance of Linux... then suddenly states that MS are the only ones likely to be standing in the end. I think his logic is flawed and he needs to get a clue... I guess nobody agreed with me.;-)
I strongly believe that the theme and the story were pulled of exceptionally well. However, the acting and the plot devestated it. Take for example our young child princess. She was shaking visibly in nearly every scene - I assume out of real nervousness. Then of course, there were the abrupt jumps from one event to the next. If you consider the limited budget of this movie, you'd have to consider how much of the film had to land on the cutting room floor.
I think this movie was fantastic otherwise though. It *felt* like a game of D&D and not to mention that every game of D&D is just a bunch of geeks sitting around being nerdy ("Where are the Cheetos?--Can I have a Mt. Dew?!" "Uhm, I'm, uhm, attacking the darkness!" "No no no! I wanted gray eyes! *waaah*").
Of course, every dragon in the movie was just, astonishing.
Hey, we also got to see teh Final Fantasy movie trailer!! That was more than worth my 8 bucks.:-)
Over here in the 412 scene, our good friend Nuke has set up a LORD game (telnet to lord.nuklear.org:31337). If you visit http://lord.nuklear.org, you'll find a really well done LORD portal that displays a public list of stats as well as history, tech notes, and a Java gateway.
The stock had been way overvalued, he said, thanks to overly enthusiastic investors who "believed Red Hat was going to overtake Microsoft. They don't believe that now."
It seems to me that the word was loud and clear at the time of their IPO. "We don't want another Microsoft!" Didn't this ring in the ears of everyone with a spare 10$M under their pillow as not overtaking?
It's just a raving pile of foolishness. The author clearly as no idea as to the effects of technology on language.
First of all, many Spanish-speaking nations aren't pumping out lots of new, headed-for-mainstream technologies. I'm sure if I'd be using a computora if IBM was located in Mexico City or we'd have a Manzana Impermeable if Steve's last name was José. The bottom line here is that the US is one of the countries that acts as a spear-head in developing technologies for the information age. Things that become mainstream tend to get the name given by their native languages stamped on those items. Since most of the computer technology in use today was made in the US, it's fitting that it's called by the names we give it all around the world.
Secondly, Spanish is not the only language being effected. My roommate is nihonjin (a Japanese person). He uses english terms for everything technology related (as they do in Japan) even when speaking in his native language? Why? Because they're smart enough know that it's just plain stupid to create new terms for things that already exist. The author states that this is about distinction. Just plain wrong. It's about REDUCING CONFUSION (which is more important anyway).
Ugh. This post was full of venom, but only because this article was so fscking retarded. It doesn't do any good to bitch about stupid shit like this - especially when it has no benefit if enacted. Come on! What benefit would there be to me calling a tamagachi a "pocket friend" instead? Or how about calling my Nintendo a "family computer"? Cripes Ana Luisa Herrera. You don't hear english speakers bitching about more and more spanish words are seeping into english. Are you so stupid that you can't understand that language 'contamination' is essential to the evolution of language?
Blah. There's no sense arguing. Everyone wants special treatment. Nothing I say will stop that.
I think whoever made this post is confused. This Trojan isn't pro-Linux... It's one of the the more anti-Linux thing any Windows user could do to other Windows users. The media will get ahold of this and portrey it as "those baby Open Source people are not resorting to dirty little tricks to try to promote Linux." It looks *really* bad.
Why do we always incist on forcing a paradigm meant for one technology onto another for the purpose of making it more understandable? Sure, lots of people understand a telephone, but wasn't the point of the Internet to make information more accessible and easier to do so? Telephones are a hassle in and of themselves, even if they are familiar... and besides, I doubt there's many people left who'd go near a computer that don't understand the concept of a URL.
I don't mean to be so brunt, but WHY the hell are you using development technologies on a SERVER? Servers need to use what is tried and true so that they remain stable and reliable... Using ext3 will not solve your problems - it will only add to them.
I imagine you're using a 2.4.x series kernel too.
Yes, you are in the dark. Stop. Use stuff that's known to work, not stuff that's experimental.
I can go to Circuit City with all my Slashdot Frequent Poster checks and buy 1000 80-gig drives, most likely capable of storing more than the human brain, and I promise you that the ensuing machine will in no way be smarter than me, or even than George W Bush.
First of all, if you did this, you'd never reach even a small fraction of what the human brain is capable of storing. The human brain NEVER loses one shred of information that it encounters. (Accessing it is another story, however.) It also stores things in perfect quality. Pick up a coffee mug. Look at it closely. If you were to try to digitize all of the geometry, the texture, the surface, the smell, the history, all the way down to the tiniest hairline fracture, you'd be hard pressed to fit it on that 1,000 drive array. Besides, this misses the point. I never said drive capasity would make a machine smart. (But even Windows PC's are smarter than George Bush. Microsoft Narrator pronounces 'subliminal' properly.) I also never said that going to Circuit City or CompUSA to buy hard drives was Moore's Law. Innovation and invention aren't the same as consumerism.
HOWEVER, you have to consider storage and calculation performance here. All intellectual reasoning can be broken down into smaller and smaller pieces, similar to how molecules are broken down into atoms, and then into protons, neutrons, electrons, and then down into quarks, etc. What I'm getting at here, is that if you can process enough of these incredibly tiny pieces, you can come close to simulating small tasks. Now, isn't that what the neurons in our brains do? Each neuron does a very very tiny task, each task may even be called a logical operation. But, get millions of these working together, and you get some fuzziness involved... you begin to see intelligence in the big picture.
What huge storage and calculating capasity allow us to do, is emulate the work of more and more and more neurons working together (neural nets). We can form very rudimentary intelligence. We're doing it now. What's needed are important other factors that are currently ambiguous, but subject to more study and classification. We don't know everything about the brain yet, nor do we fully understand the human pysche. Upon further research, we could potentially emulate these things in a digital fashion the same as we now emulate the chemical reactions that take place in a human brain.
You also have to consider that these things cannot be designed, regardless how much knowledge we have. Consider a newborn baby. A baby's brain is an incredibly powerful tool. It's got an incredible amount of potential... BUT... when a baby is first born, it has no power of rational thought whatsoever. Where does it come from? It's gradually developed as very simple problems are presented to the child to be solved. As this occurs, the brain records the solutions for these very simple problems. As more difficult problems are encountered, instead of redoing previous work, it references the solutions, building on top of them. An intelligent computer would have be programmed to do something similar... and it would have be raised like a child. Talk to a professor who researches machine learning, as I am not well versed on the topic enough to tell you how we design systems that can accomplish this. I can tell you that two of the most limiting factors are time and storage capsity. Even the most trivial solutions to the most basic problems require a lot of storage (imagine if you're a baby who is comparing a train to an apple... you're going to have to pictorally represent a LOT of samples of apples and trains before you're perfect).
But again, this is too detailed a topic to get into on a post. Technology is getting there. Consider research in computational linguistics, computer vision, machine learning, etc. These are areas, many of which are relatively advanced, that can help to make the aforementioned process possible. Who knows though... thought is a damn complicated thing.:-)
Intelligent computers are inevitable and essential
on
Son of HAL For Sale
·
· Score: 5
Yes, they are. Or at least, in my opinion. First of all, let's consider the way technology is advancing...
Every 18 months our technology doubles (I'm really generalizing... bear with me here). That means, regardless of what point technology must reach before we can make truly intelligent machines, it will eventually happen so long as this trend continues. So, yes, it will happen.
Why are they essential? This question is not so easy to answer. First of all, to quote my favorite author, I am going to say, "humanity has too many eggs in one fagile basket." Humans will have to spread to another area (*g*) for our survival (insofar as continued scientific advancement). We are explorers. However, there's one problem. Human beings are fragile... we break easy and die quick.
Intelligent machines will lend to the exploration of immediate and distant space and I PROMISE you they will come to pass before warp drive (you heard it here first, but it's kind of obvious). Well, why do we want to explore? It's simply a part of human nature, and we'll never be satisified unless we can continue doing so (sorry, but cave diving uncharted labrynths or walking through jungles isn't quire exploration anymore). Since we can't do it, we might as well create something that thinks like we do that can go out and do it for us.
Also, consider a more practical reason. I'm a strong believer that the next phase of human evolution will involve the integration of man and machine. One area in which evolution will be most important I think, is the integration of computers and innate human intelligence. Brain augmentations. You can't do this without an intelligent computer - human minds are too complex to supliment without intelligent interpretation. Logic doens't always apply here (but that's another argument).
Oh well... I couldn't possibly cover this whole topic in a post, but I hope I've created some hooks and place holders for other people to fill in. As for myself, I can't wait until I can carry on a conversation with my PC.
Yes, I agree. I think it may be a little ridiculous to expect the registar to not be offended by anything. After all, they are human too.
But, on the same token, as providing a service to the Internet population - a VERY diversified group of people, you're kind of required to put up with all sorts of different things.
If you didn't want to run the risk of being offended by viewpoints different from you own, don't become a domain name registrar
Don't mourn the deceased. That only insults them. Instead, sit around, have a few laughs, talking about what they did or accomplished. Everyone here is making jokes about Muuss because, well, they feel connected to him in someway.
I'm sure that if Muuss was reading/. right now, he'd be laughing at these jokes as much as any of us.
Let me tell you why humor exists... we have humor so that we can cope with the tragic events that populate our lives. It's a way of coping with loss... and a pretty damn good one too. Besides, I can barely think of any better ways to respect the dead than by calling attention to their accomplishments through humor.
Although, I must apologize for contributing to the excessive "destination unreachable" jokes. *sob* I didn't read everyone's posts before I cracked that one.
Attention to NSI. Not everyone is offended by what offends you. I know it's hard to accept, but everybody has their own relative point of view.
What does it say about people like this? Do they ignore the fact that if you decide you want to walk down a sidewalk to a strip club, the sidewalks don't throw a barracade up that says "your direction is inappropriate, please choose another". It's everyone person's right to choose what they want to expose themselves to.
This form of censorship is utterly redundant and excessive. IF you are offended by something, you are NOT going to go out searching for that thing on purpose. If someone's offended by the word "f*ck", they are not going to type it into a search engine. As for those of us who aren't offended, we don't care either way.
Besides, this kind of blockage at a search engine does nothing to keep you from all the naughty words, porn banners, and so on that will be thrown at your face once you start clicking links.
Why do people think they are going to make some sort of positive influence by trying to censor the Net? Arrogant, conceited, and utterly foolish. Stopping the ocean tides would yield better results.
I may be wrong (I think I might be, but I'm still curious). Isn't the FBI not allowed to seize snail mail in transit? If I send a letter to someone and it doesn't violate any of the postal service's policies (no flamables, no biohazards, etc... just a letter) then they don't have a right to it, correct?
If this is the case, why is email any different? If I send a letter to someone, even if it's an evil plot for world domination, how can the FBI have a right to grab it midstream?
What about Whistler? Whistler has support to run apps in compatability mode using Win95/NT4 API's. They do care about not breaking old Windows apps, but if they make big changes... they can save themselves.
I know about this.:-) The reason I didn't make a reference to it is because it's an obvious solution, but still doesn't satisfy the point I made in my post. It still calls on an emulator to do the job.
One of the more important tasks in getting Linux more mainstream is the ability to run Windows apps.
One problem is, virtual machine emulators are generally pretty clunky, slow, and reinvent a lot of hardware access that should otherwise be done directly.
For these reasons, I believe the WINE project is more important than either VMware or Plex86.
Don't get me wrong, I think Plex86 is a great project and virtual machines have many uses...
But if you're a Linux user who wants to run Windows apps for one reason or another, or if you're a Windows user who wants to use Linux but are bound by Windows apps, then you need a better solution. Something smeamless. Something lower in the OS that will make executing Win32 binaries as easy as ELF.
Currently, I don't think this is possible. We've got a long way to go, and it may be a while before Linux users will accept a, say,/lib/win32-xxx.so, for example. What I'm really getting at here is, we need focus on assimilation. We need something that acts like it's native. Putting VMware, Plex86, or even WINE in the process, creates a jarring effect that still is insufficient for mainstream use.
I think it's interesting that we can have standards and common procedures/protocols for routine tasks in our government and military, etc. But, our country lacks a standard paradigm for the submission of votes. Every state has unique voting equipment with their own little ways of going about the process - with varying degrees of effectiveness (holes not being punched properly, therefore votes not tallied). In Pennsylvnaia, I was pretty confident that the big red button I pushed sent my choices home to the ballot sheet. It was solid, firm, and fairly up to date, using the power of a machine to do the task. In Florida, I am to understand that people have to punch the holes with their own strenght? That's just plain primative. But what I'm getting at is the two entirely different proceedures.
Regardless of the technology (or lack thereof) used, every precinct of every state should use the exact same algorithms and tools to carry on democracy. That way, even if the system is not fool-proof, it will fail consistently and predictably. This non-uniform occurrance of difficulty is the biggest problem and because of the lack of uniformity, the only way to be sure would be to do a hand count of every vote in every state. Who knows what happened elsewhere...
There's something about that clear disc beind held up on the products page that just makes me think, "gee, that looks a lot like a single CD-ROM disc outer covering". Their prototype modle at the bottom of the page also looked rather, uhm, complete for being a prototype. Well, as for the company I work for, our prototype devices look like hacks - not like they just came off the assembly like.
Seems kind of fishy, but I guess we'll see when the product comes out.:-)
The concept of copyright originally existed to protect the interests of an inventor/artist/etc. from their *idea* being copied and then appropriated. It never had anything to do with people making actual copies. Why? Up until recent years, it was never possible to make a perfect duplicate of a piece of work (and up until the past two decades, copying software wasn't even a thought). People had tape recorders. People had low quality copy machines. There was nothing that could precisely reproduce a work in any kind of high quality fashion. Because of this, it's clear that copyright was intended to protect against something else entirely. As mentioned, this was to guard people who create things from finding other people saying "I made that first!".
I don't know at what point, but somebody decided that the whole issue was actually making copies, not protecting IP. Which is interesting because I do not see how actually copying a work causes any infringement upon IP rights. If you make a duplicate, that duplicate still bears all of the branding of hte original creator - and makes it even less likely for you to be able to say "I invented/created this".
Or at least that's what I thought until I read Webster's definition of the word copyright. Hmmm... I guess They got to Webster first.:-) But the definition is kind of interesting...
How could this definition apply back in the days before it was even possible to "distribute" a piece of work like we can today? Can this still be interpreted such that distribution rights matter when it comes to people trying to literally steal and redistribute for the purpose of some sort of personal gain?
Call me crazy, but if my interpretation is correct, MP3's don't do not currently do this. Neither does DeCSS. Hmmm... Just my thoughts.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess we'll have to wait a little while before we see games that show some serious creativity. I'm impressed, but there's better ways of using that horsepower. :-)
Btw, I honestly did think that article was bull. Consider the end of the article. He jumps from the decimation of Microsoft with the rapid acceptance of Linux... then suddenly states that MS are the only ones likely to be standing in the end. I think his logic is flawed and he needs to get a clue... I guess nobody agreed with me. ;-)
I no longer have 50 karma points! Now there's incentive for me to write something worthwhile. (Moderate this down too, please.)
I think this movie was fantastic otherwise though. It *felt* like a game of D&D and not to mention that every game of D&D is just a bunch of geeks sitting around being nerdy ("Where are the Cheetos?--Can I have a Mt. Dew?!" "Uhm, I'm, uhm, attacking the darkness!" "No no no! I wanted gray eyes! *waaah*").
Of course, every dragon in the movie was just, astonishing.
Hey, we also got to see teh Final Fantasy movie trailer!! That was more than worth my 8 bucks. :-)
Enjoy!
It seems to me that the word was loud and clear at the time of their IPO. "We don't want another Microsoft!" Didn't this ring in the ears of everyone with a spare 10$M under their pillow as not overtaking?
Too much ego power. *tsk-tsk*
It's just a raving pile of foolishness. The author clearly as no idea as to the effects of technology on language.
First of all, many Spanish-speaking nations aren't pumping out lots of new, headed-for-mainstream technologies. I'm sure if I'd be using a computora if IBM was located in Mexico City or we'd have a Manzana Impermeable if Steve's last name was José. The bottom line here is that the US is one of the countries that acts as a spear-head in developing technologies for the information age. Things that become mainstream tend to get the name given by their native languages stamped on those items. Since most of the computer technology in use today was made in the US, it's fitting that it's called by the names we give it all around the world.
Secondly, Spanish is not the only language being effected. My roommate is nihonjin (a Japanese person). He uses english terms for everything technology related (as they do in Japan) even when speaking in his native language? Why? Because they're smart enough know that it's just plain stupid to create new terms for things that already exist. The author states that this is about distinction. Just plain wrong. It's about REDUCING CONFUSION (which is more important anyway).
Ugh. This post was full of venom, but only because this article was so fscking retarded. It doesn't do any good to bitch about stupid shit like this - especially when it has no benefit if enacted. Come on! What benefit would there be to me calling a tamagachi a "pocket friend" instead? Or how about calling my Nintendo a "family computer"? Cripes Ana Luisa Herrera. You don't hear english speakers bitching about more and more spanish words are seeping into english. Are you so stupid that you can't understand that language 'contamination' is essential to the evolution of language?
Blah. There's no sense arguing. Everyone wants special treatment. Nothing I say will stop that.
I think whoever made this post is confused. This Trojan isn't pro-Linux... It's one of the the more anti-Linux thing any Windows user could do to other Windows users. The media will get ahold of this and portrey it as "those baby Open Source people are not resorting to dirty little tricks to try to promote Linux." It looks *really* bad.
Score: -1, Redundant.
ReiserFS hasn't even a tiny fraction of the life of ext2... and is clearly full of bugs.
I imagine you're using a 2.4.x series kernel too.
Yes, you are in the dark. Stop. Use stuff that's known to work, not stuff that's experimental.
First of all, if you did this, you'd never reach even a small fraction of what the human brain is capable of storing. The human brain NEVER loses one shred of information that it encounters. (Accessing it is another story, however.) It also stores things in perfect quality. Pick up a coffee mug. Look at it closely. If you were to try to digitize all of the geometry, the texture, the surface, the smell, the history, all the way down to the tiniest hairline fracture, you'd be hard pressed to fit it on that 1,000 drive array. Besides, this misses the point. I never said drive capasity would make a machine smart. (But even Windows PC's are smarter than George Bush. Microsoft Narrator pronounces 'subliminal' properly.) I also never said that going to Circuit City or CompUSA to buy hard drives was Moore's Law. Innovation and invention aren't the same as consumerism.
HOWEVER, you have to consider storage and calculation performance here. All intellectual reasoning can be broken down into smaller and smaller pieces, similar to how molecules are broken down into atoms, and then into protons, neutrons, electrons, and then down into quarks, etc. What I'm getting at here, is that if you can process enough of these incredibly tiny pieces, you can come close to simulating small tasks. Now, isn't that what the neurons in our brains do? Each neuron does a very very tiny task, each task may even be called a logical operation. But, get millions of these working together, and you get some fuzziness involved... you begin to see intelligence in the big picture.
What huge storage and calculating capasity allow us to do, is emulate the work of more and more and more neurons working together (neural nets). We can form very rudimentary intelligence. We're doing it now. What's needed are important other factors that are currently ambiguous, but subject to more study and classification. We don't know everything about the brain yet, nor do we fully understand the human pysche. Upon further research, we could potentially emulate these things in a digital fashion the same as we now emulate the chemical reactions that take place in a human brain.
You also have to consider that these things cannot be designed, regardless how much knowledge we have. Consider a newborn baby. A baby's brain is an incredibly powerful tool. It's got an incredible amount of potential... BUT... when a baby is first born, it has no power of rational thought whatsoever. Where does it come from? It's gradually developed as very simple problems are presented to the child to be solved. As this occurs, the brain records the solutions for these very simple problems. As more difficult problems are encountered, instead of redoing previous work, it references the solutions, building on top of them. An intelligent computer would have be programmed to do something similar... and it would have be raised like a child. Talk to a professor who researches machine learning, as I am not well versed on the topic enough to tell you how we design systems that can accomplish this. I can tell you that two of the most limiting factors are time and storage capsity. Even the most trivial solutions to the most basic problems require a lot of storage (imagine if you're a baby who is comparing a train to an apple... you're going to have to pictorally represent a LOT of samples of apples and trains before you're perfect).
But again, this is too detailed a topic to get into on a post. Technology is getting there. Consider research in computational linguistics, computer vision, machine learning, etc. These are areas, many of which are relatively advanced, that can help to make the aforementioned process possible. Who knows though... thought is a damn complicated thing. :-)
Every 18 months our technology doubles (I'm really generalizing... bear with me here). That means, regardless of what point technology must reach before we can make truly intelligent machines, it will eventually happen so long as this trend continues. So, yes, it will happen.
Why are they essential? This question is not so easy to answer. First of all, to quote my favorite author, I am going to say, "humanity has too many eggs in one fagile basket." Humans will have to spread to another area (*g*) for our survival (insofar as continued scientific advancement). We are explorers. However, there's one problem. Human beings are fragile... we break easy and die quick.
Intelligent machines will lend to the exploration of immediate and distant space and I PROMISE you they will come to pass before warp drive (you heard it here first, but it's kind of obvious). Well, why do we want to explore? It's simply a part of human nature, and we'll never be satisified unless we can continue doing so (sorry, but cave diving uncharted labrynths or walking through jungles isn't quire exploration anymore). Since we can't do it, we might as well create something that thinks like we do that can go out and do it for us.
Also, consider a more practical reason. I'm a strong believer that the next phase of human evolution will involve the integration of man and machine. One area in which evolution will be most important I think, is the integration of computers and innate human intelligence. Brain augmentations. You can't do this without an intelligent computer - human minds are too complex to supliment without intelligent interpretation. Logic doens't always apply here (but that's another argument).
Oh well... I couldn't possibly cover this whole topic in a post, but I hope I've created some hooks and place holders for other people to fill in. As for myself, I can't wait until I can carry on a conversation with my PC.
Of course, I'm sure lacking the cool HAL 9000 aluminum emblem makes every penny you'd give you Clarke Omniputer (is Omni-puter leet speak?) worth it.
But, on the same token, as providing a service to the Internet population - a VERY diversified group of people, you're kind of required to put up with all sorts of different things.
If you didn't want to run the risk of being offended by viewpoints different from you own, don't become a domain name registrar
I'm sure that if Muuss was reading /. right now, he'd be laughing at these jokes as much as any of us.
Let me tell you why humor exists... we have humor so that we can cope with the tragic events that populate our lives. It's a way of coping with loss... and a pretty damn good one too. Besides, I can barely think of any better ways to respect the dead than by calling attention to their accomplishments through humor.
Although, I must apologize for contributing to the excessive "destination unreachable" jokes. *sob* I didn't read everyone's posts before I cracked that one.
user@foo ~$ ping mike.muuss
PING mike.muuss (128.63.240.80): 56 data bytes
^C
--- mike.muuss ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 0 packets received, 100% packet loss
What does it say about people like this? Do they ignore the fact that if you decide you want to walk down a sidewalk to a strip club, the sidewalks don't throw a barracade up that says "your direction is inappropriate, please choose another". It's everyone person's right to choose what they want to expose themselves to.
This form of censorship is utterly redundant and excessive. IF you are offended by something, you are NOT going to go out searching for that thing on purpose. If someone's offended by the word "f*ck", they are not going to type it into a search engine. As for those of us who aren't offended, we don't care either way.
Besides, this kind of blockage at a search engine does nothing to keep you from all the naughty words, porn banners, and so on that will be thrown at your face once you start clicking links.
Why do people think they are going to make some sort of positive influence by trying to censor the Net? Arrogant, conceited, and utterly foolish. Stopping the ocean tides would yield better results.
If this is the case, why is email any different? If I send a letter to someone, even if it's an evil plot for world domination, how can the FBI have a right to grab it midstream?
What about Whistler? Whistler has support to run apps in compatability mode using Win95/NT4 API's. They do care about not breaking old Windows apps, but if they make big changes... they can save themselves.
I know about this. :-) The reason I didn't make a reference to it is because it's an obvious solution, but still doesn't satisfy the point I made in my post. It still calls on an emulator to do the job.
One problem is, virtual machine emulators are generally pretty clunky, slow, and reinvent a lot of hardware access that should otherwise be done directly.
For these reasons, I believe the WINE project is more important than either VMware or Plex86.
Don't get me wrong, I think Plex86 is a great project and virtual machines have many uses...
But if you're a Linux user who wants to run Windows apps for one reason or another, or if you're a Windows user who wants to use Linux but are bound by Windows apps, then you need a better solution. Something smeamless. Something lower in the OS that will make executing Win32 binaries as easy as ELF.
Currently, I don't think this is possible. We've got a long way to go, and it may be a while before Linux users will accept a, say, /lib/win32-xxx.so, for example. What I'm really getting at here is, we need focus on assimilation. We need something that acts like it's native. Putting VMware, Plex86, or even WINE in the process, creates a jarring effect that still is insufficient for mainstream use.
We need: user@foo ~$ ./notepad.exe
Regardless of the technology (or lack thereof) used, every precinct of every state should use the exact same algorithms and tools to carry on democracy. That way, even if the system is not fool-proof, it will fail consistently and predictably. This non-uniform occurrance of difficulty is the biggest problem and because of the lack of uniformity, the only way to be sure would be to do a hand count of every vote in every state. Who knows what happened elsewhere...
Seems kind of fishy, but I guess we'll see when the product comes out. :-)
I don't know at what point, but somebody decided that the whole issue was actually making copies, not protecting IP. Which is interesting because I do not see how actually copying a work causes any infringement upon IP rights. If you make a duplicate, that duplicate still bears all of the branding of hte original creator - and makes it even less likely for you to be able to say "I invented/created this".
Or at least that's what I thought until I read Webster's definition of the word copyright. Hmmm... I guess They got to Webster first. :-) But the definition is kind of interesting...
copyright \Cop"y*right\, n. The right of an author or his assignee, under statute, to print and publish his literary or artistic work, exclusively of all other persons. This right may be had in maps, charts, engravings, plays, and musical compositions, as well as in books.
Source: Webster's Revised Unabridged Dictionary, © 1996, 1998 MICRA, Inc.
How could this definition apply back in the days before it was even possible to "distribute" a piece of work like we can today? Can this still be interpreted such that distribution rights matter when it comes to people trying to literally steal and redistribute for the purpose of some sort of personal gain?
Call me crazy, but if my interpretation is correct, MP3's don't do not currently do this. Neither does DeCSS. Hmmm... Just my thoughts.