Well, all this about unions etc. has been fairly interesting. What may make some sense is to organize a professional organization, such as doctors, psychologists, social-workers, lawyers, and many other service-oriented professions have.
These are quasi regulatory, quasi advocational organizations responsible for managing quality and standards of service, but also of promoting the interests and welfare of the members.
These are no less suceptible to the machinations of politics (my father is the Executive Director of a Social Workers' Association) but I have seen far fewer "nasty" politics emerge. Such an association could explicitly abstain from partisan politics in its constitution, and could establish mediation and arbitration policies for dispute resolution and some of the positive elements.
In essence, it's a restricted union-esque organization. Since it's not "in opposition" to management, but an umbrella organization that managers can be a part of, if they fit the professional designation, then it can be quite co-operative.
If nothing else, this organization could, rather than a force to confront management abuses, instead provide an educational, consultative approach that can be made truly win-win.
regards,
Christian Gruber
Probably it would act as the net has in the past
on
Slashdot During War?
·
· Score: 1
Historically, the internet-based media (in particular USENET) have acted as a distributed communication medium (duh, and it's what exactly?) allowing disparate views to be disseminated globally. Anyone surprised?
Example:
Russian Abortive Coup
When factions of the military attempted to take over the Russian government in the last days of Gorbechev's presidency, (You know, when Yeltzin came riding in on a tank...), the Russian military coup-leaders cut off various media, but did not cut off basic phone lines and data lines from universities.
This allowed a myriad students, staff, and faculty to disseminate their view of the situation on the ground to the West (providing clear contrast to the reports of the controlled Russian media), and (more importantly) to hear from their equivalents in the West of the situation as we saw it.
In short, we could tell them, "Hang on! We're not letting this happen unopposed. We're not buying the line you're being fed from your media." How effective was it? In the actual effort to stop the coup, probably not very. But it was a focal point of morale boosting for those fighting to retain the new freedoms offered by Gorbechev, and prevented the will-crushing efforts of coup-driven propaganda. And tyranny typically requires compliance and ignorance to succeed.
The spread of information is a critical innoculation against propaganda, and serves as a potent aid in preventing the sort of war we had in the early parts of the last century. The unfortunate difficulty is found when we are faced when seemingly free information from commercially produced media, masking as true and unbiased reporting, spreads the propaganda. It is sources such as NNTP/USENET, the slashdots and other such media which can provide a buffer against the new propaganda machines as much as they provide such a buffer against old-style propaganda.
Increasingly I hope they also provide a jolt of reality and information where none such exists. A prime example of this is Burundi the 1972 genocide, an "intellectual genocide" wherin members of the majority Hutu tribe with high-school educations were executed by the Tutsi-controlled government of the day, or forced to flee. There was absolutely no reaction from the west. This to no small degree led to the retalliatory genocide against the Tutsis in the 1990's in then-Hutu-controlled Rwanda, Burundi's sister state.
Perhaps if such information were disseminated, and readers of such alternative media could mobilize to inform their governments of their strong opposition to such violence, such brutality could be avoided, and such cycles of retaliation could be prevented.
Hmm. Hasn't Oracle, Sybase, and a host of others been indexing distributed databases since the mid-eighties? I seems to recall configuring clustered indexing on database clusters... Hmm.;)
For that matter, NeXT's (now Apple's) Enterprise Object Framework (an OO->RDBMS mapping system) creates object caches of database contents, and these caches can span multiple databases on multiple machines, which fits the language.
This is an old arguement for Canadians, who have been paying premiums on media for (perhaps) a year now. (It may be longer, but I've clearly stopped paying attention...)
The main criticism I have with these fees is not that it penalizes the innocent, it's that the money doesn't find its way to the artists anyway. And independent artists who are not beneficiaries of RIAA and MPAA payouts are penalized because their sole distribution method (pre-mp3, that is) has been blank cassettes and CD's. Now we have hard-drives and optical media devices which are going to have copy protection, which may close off even these mechanisms of promulgation. Put another way, Metalica and their like will get some money, but joe's band down the street get's nothing. The payouts are based (to my understanding) on record/tape/cd sales.
Ultimately these fees, and the organizations who have demanded them are fundamentally not interested in art or preservation of income for artists, but it is a thinly veiled cash grab to offset the increasing volume of art-commerce done directly between consumer and producer. In short, the middle-men (and high-selling artists on their payroll who don't benefit from a strong indie scene) don't like being cut-out and so they are fighting back with international lobbying for national compensation.
What you wish for is not relevant as Plex86 is a virtualization, not emulation of the x86 platform. It is not intended to run on any other architecture, as that would be emulation, not virtualization.
Plex86 is a virtualization system, not a full emulation system (or at least it contains an emulation system, but the point is virtualization.)
The point of this is that instructions do not have to be emulated because an x86 instruction on FreeBSD, say, is the same machine code instruction on Windows. It's the APIs that are different. So rather than emulating hardware, Plex86 "passes-through" the machine instructions to the hardware unchanged, achieving very low drag on performance.
So what you want is Bochs, pure and simple. I do hope that Bochs development doesn't permanently stall now that it's creator is working on Plex86. It's a good product, and frankly, I'd love to run x86 apps on OpenBSD on an Alpha.;)
VMWare will almost certainly port their stuff to the MacOSX, though probably not Darwin. I'll bet that Bochs is ported to Darwin soon, as it runs on three other BSD's
In my experience, there are only human impediments to successfully creating healthy software. Technologies are sufficiently developed in most languages that most software can be written fairly efficiently using a wealth of frameworks and libraries. So why does software suck?
Combine time-pressures, market pressures, upper-management pressures, and a lack of training and professional standards, and you have a whole class of employee (the project manager) who has only incentives to lie and hedge, and no incentive to be honest about schedule, feature set, state-of-the-project, internal project problems, etc.
Assume a project of 15 people, with a 3 million dollar budget, and a project manager leading four teams. That's pretty complex stuff to manage. Now what if it's business critical, and he's getting letters from board-members and C*O staff imparting the import of the project unto him from on high. Can you say pressure cooker?
Now consider that three developers are fighting, and every teaser this manager has sent up the chain about problems has resulted in a standard "we expect you to solve this on time and on budget" no-help answer.
Now imagine that some contractor or 3rd party vendor that the architect and project manager had made noises about to upper management lied about their capabilities.
Now imagine that his buddy frank was fired three months ago after a fiasco project in their other business line.
Now imagine that he's not vested, but will be vested by the last month of the project.
Now imagine why this person would ever ever ever say there's a slight problem with the project until it's almost over. Or worse, he'll "two week" the project for months over time, over budget, and they'll release buggy, crappy, untested code to the customer in a beta which amounts to an alpha, expecting the customer to catch and report all the bugs.
It's no life at all, and certainly no way to get quality software, but it's a scenario I have seen repeatedly over the last few years.
Frankly, I've got a shiny new Duron box which just kicks royal tush running OpenBSD as my file/samba/X/firewall/nat/nfs/imap/smtp/nntp server. And best part, even with a killer graphics card, large hard drive, the thing only cost me $1300 CAD. (That's about $3.50 USD... but seriously folks, probably about $850 USD at current exchange.
I just don't think that it's significantly worse than the Athlon, and it kicks the pants off of a celeron at equivalent clock speed for a comparable price.
I'm an avid OpenBSD enthusiast, and I too am concerned that Plex86 run on the BSDs. Given that you may not have the resources to acomplish wide-spread support, could your team possibly provide api lists, indicating what APIs would nead to be implemented by a platform porter. Your documentation said that you would be migrating cross-platform code from the linux source. Perhaps by publishing the required APIs, you could encourage others to do this work for you.
There are good examples of this already. UAE is an Amiga hardware emulator, which runs AmigaOS and AROS (I'm hoping to try OpenBSD on it soon;) It passes through serial and parallel port access.
Harder would be CDROMs and other such devices. Especially in Multi-User secure environments. You would have to open up permissions on a variety of devices to allow Plex86 to use the passthrough if it were running in an unpriviledged user's process.
Definately a good thing, if you can get it, though.
The basic requirement for this would not be that someone add DirectX support to Plex86, but that:
someone write a VESA (preferably XVGA+ or better;) emulated video hardware using DGA, DirectX or some other direct-to-hardware method on the host system
THEN write a Windows95/98/NT/2000 driver (Or X driver depending on guest system) for that emulated hardware that include direct-to-hardware support.
I could see a lot of possibilities for passing through low-level 3D calls.
This would also be the requirement on Xwindows, and Mesa would probably be a good package on which to base the 3D emulated hardware support.
For the record, this is what UAE (Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator) does. Basically it has a "UAE" graphics card, and a driver was written for the Picasso96 accelerated graphics replacement subsystem for AmigaOS that used this "hardware". On WinUAE this basically allowed me to run the AmigaOS in 1400x1050 resolution on Windows2000 (WinUAE hosts on DirectX) on my Dell laptop. Fun fun fun.
Hmm. Perhaps, when the Plex86 folks are done, they can do Plex68K. There's a good 68K emulator in UAE, and Bernie Mayer wrote a patch for JIT compilation in UAE.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, all this about unions etc. has been fairly interesting. What may make some sense is to organize a professional organization, such as doctors, psychologists, social-workers, lawyers, and many other service-oriented professions have.
These are quasi regulatory, quasi advocational organizations responsible for managing quality and standards of service, but also of promoting the interests and welfare of the members.
These are no less suceptible to the machinations of politics (my father is the Executive Director of a Social Workers' Association) but I have seen far fewer "nasty" politics emerge. Such an association could explicitly abstain from partisan politics in its constitution, and could establish mediation and arbitration policies for dispute resolution and some of the positive elements.
In essence, it's a restricted union-esque organization. Since it's not "in opposition" to management, but an umbrella organization that managers can be a part of, if they fit the professional designation, then it can be quite co-operative.
If nothing else, this organization could, rather than a force to confront management abuses, instead provide an educational, consultative approach that can be made truly win-win.
regards,
Christian Gruber
Historically, the internet-based media (in particular USENET) have acted as a distributed communication medium (duh, and it's what exactly?) allowing disparate views to be disseminated globally. Anyone surprised?
Example: Russian Abortive Coup
When factions of the military attempted to take over the Russian government in the last days of Gorbechev's presidency, (You know, when Yeltzin came riding in on a tank...), the Russian military coup-leaders cut off various media, but did not cut off basic phone lines and data lines from universities.
This allowed a myriad students, staff, and faculty to disseminate their view of the situation on the ground to the West (providing clear contrast to the reports of the controlled Russian media), and (more importantly) to hear from their equivalents in the West of the situation as we saw it.
In short, we could tell them, "Hang on! We're not letting this happen unopposed. We're not buying the line you're being fed from your media." How effective was it? In the actual effort to stop the coup, probably not very. But it was a focal point of morale boosting for those fighting to retain the new freedoms offered by Gorbechev, and prevented the will-crushing efforts of coup-driven propaganda. And tyranny typically requires compliance and ignorance to succeed.
The spread of information is a critical innoculation against propaganda, and serves as a potent aid in preventing the sort of war we had in the early parts of the last century. The unfortunate difficulty is found when we are faced when seemingly free information from commercially produced media, masking as true and unbiased reporting, spreads the propaganda. It is sources such as NNTP/USENET, the slashdots and other such media which can provide a buffer against the new propaganda machines as much as they provide such a buffer against old-style propaganda.
Increasingly I hope they also provide a jolt of reality and information where none such exists. A prime example of this is Burundi the 1972 genocide, an "intellectual genocide" wherin members of the majority Hutu tribe with high-school educations were executed by the Tutsi-controlled government of the day, or forced to flee. There was absolutely no reaction from the west. This to no small degree led to the retalliatory genocide against the Tutsis in the 1990's in then-Hutu-controlled Rwanda, Burundi's sister state.
Perhaps if such information were disseminated, and readers of such alternative media could mobilize to inform their governments of their strong opposition to such violence, such brutality could be avoided, and such cycles of retaliation could be prevented.
Hmm. Hasn't Oracle, Sybase, and a host of others been indexing distributed databases since the mid-eighties? I seems to recall configuring clustered indexing on database clusters... Hmm. ;)
For that matter, NeXT's (now Apple's) Enterprise Object Framework (an OO->RDBMS mapping system) creates object caches of database contents, and these caches can span multiple databases on multiple machines, which fits the language.
Can you say "Prior Art?" I knew that you could...
This is an old arguement for Canadians, who have been paying premiums on media for (perhaps) a year now. (It may be longer, but I've clearly stopped paying attention...)
The main criticism I have with these fees is not that it penalizes the innocent, it's that the money doesn't find its way to the artists anyway. And independent artists who are not beneficiaries of RIAA and MPAA payouts are penalized because their sole distribution method (pre-mp3, that is) has been blank cassettes and CD's. Now we have hard-drives and optical media devices which are going to have copy protection, which may close off even these mechanisms of promulgation. Put another way, Metalica and their like will get some money, but joe's band down the street get's nothing. The payouts are based (to my understanding) on record/tape/cd sales.
Ultimately these fees, and the organizations who have demanded them are fundamentally not interested in art or preservation of income for artists, but it is a thinly veiled cash grab to offset the increasing volume of art-commerce done directly between consumer and producer. In short, the middle-men (and high-selling artists on their payroll who don't benefit from a strong indie scene) don't like being cut-out and so they are fighting back with international lobbying for national compensation.
Fie! Fie on them!
Re-read the information on the Plex86 site.
What you wish for is not relevant as Plex86 is a virtualization, not emulation of the x86 platform. It is not intended to run on any other architecture, as that would be emulation, not virtualization.
I've seen an Amiga emulator running an Amiga emulator on Windows. Tres cool.
Plex86 is a virtualization system, not a full emulation system (or at least it contains an emulation system, but the point is virtualization.)
;)
The point of this is that instructions do not have to be emulated because an x86 instruction on FreeBSD, say, is the same machine code instruction on Windows. It's the APIs that are different. So rather than emulating hardware, Plex86 "passes-through" the machine instructions to the hardware unchanged, achieving very low drag on performance.
So what you want is Bochs, pure and simple. I do hope that Bochs development doesn't permanently stall now that it's creator is working on Plex86. It's a good product, and frankly, I'd love to run x86 apps on OpenBSD on an Alpha.
VMWare will almost certainly port their stuff to the MacOSX, though probably not Darwin. I'll bet that Bochs is ported to Darwin soon, as it runs on three other BSD's
In my experience, there are only human impediments to successfully creating healthy software. Technologies are sufficiently developed in most languages that most software can be written fairly efficiently using a wealth of frameworks and libraries. So why does software suck?
Combine time-pressures, market pressures, upper-management pressures, and a lack of training and professional standards, and you have a whole class of employee (the project manager) who has only incentives to lie and hedge, and no incentive to be honest about schedule, feature set, state-of-the-project, internal project problems, etc.
Assume a project of 15 people, with a 3 million dollar budget, and a project manager leading four teams. That's pretty complex stuff to manage. Now what if it's business critical, and he's getting letters from board-members and C*O staff imparting the import of the project unto him from on high. Can you say pressure cooker?
Now consider that three developers are fighting, and every teaser this manager has sent up the chain about problems has resulted in a standard "we expect you to solve this on time and on budget" no-help answer.
Now imagine that some contractor or 3rd party vendor that the architect and project manager had made noises about to upper management lied about their capabilities.
Now imagine that his buddy frank was fired three months ago after a fiasco project in their other business line.
Now imagine that he's not vested, but will be vested by the last month of the project.
Now imagine why this person would ever ever ever say there's a slight problem with the project until it's almost over. Or worse, he'll "two week" the project for months over time, over budget, and they'll release buggy, crappy, untested code to the customer in a beta which amounts to an alpha, expecting the customer to catch and report all the bugs.
It's no life at all, and certainly no way to get quality software, but it's a scenario I have seen repeatedly over the last few years.
Frankly, I've got a shiny new Duron box which just kicks royal tush running OpenBSD as my file/samba/X/firewall/nat/nfs/imap/smtp/nntp server. And best part, even with a killer graphics card, large hard drive, the thing only cost me $1300 CAD. (That's about $3.50 USD... but seriously folks, probably about $850 USD at current exchange.
I just don't think that it's significantly worse than the Athlon, and it kicks the pants off of a celeron at equivalent clock speed for a comparable price.
I'm an avid OpenBSD enthusiast, and I too am concerned that Plex86 run on the BSDs. Given that you may not have the resources to acomplish wide-spread support, could your team possibly provide api lists, indicating what APIs would nead to be implemented by a platform porter. Your documentation said that you would be migrating cross-platform code from the linux source. Perhaps by publishing the required APIs, you could encourage others to do this work for you.
There are good examples of this already. UAE is an Amiga hardware emulator, which runs AmigaOS and AROS (I'm hoping to try OpenBSD on it soon ;) It passes through serial and parallel port access.
Harder would be CDROMs and other such devices. Especially in Multi-User secure environments. You would have to open up permissions on a variety of devices to allow Plex86 to use the passthrough if it were running in an unpriviledged user's process.
Definately a good thing, if you can get it, though.
The basic requirement for this would not be that someone add DirectX support to Plex86, but that:
- someone write a VESA (preferably XVGA+ or better
;) emulated video hardware using DGA, DirectX or some other direct-to-hardware method on the host system
- THEN write a Windows95/98/NT/2000 driver (Or X driver depending on guest system) for that emulated hardware that include direct-to-hardware support.
I could see a lot of possibilities for passing through low-level 3D calls.This would also be the requirement on Xwindows, and Mesa would probably be a good package on which to base the 3D emulated hardware support.
For the record, this is what UAE (Ubiquitous Amiga Emulator) does. Basically it has a "UAE" graphics card, and a driver was written for the Picasso96 accelerated graphics replacement subsystem for AmigaOS that used this "hardware". On WinUAE this basically allowed me to run the AmigaOS in 1400x1050 resolution on Windows2000 (WinUAE hosts on DirectX) on my Dell laptop. Fun fun fun.
Hmm. Perhaps, when the Plex86 folks are done, they can do Plex68K. There's a good 68K emulator in UAE, and Bernie Mayer wrote a patch for JIT compilation in UAE.