Yes, the version incompatibilities add to the end-users decision process. I disagree with the figure of 99% of users wouldn't of changed.
Do not forget the sales and marketing clout of Microsoft. Many companies buy on the basis that they are told that they need an upgrade or that they beleive the upgrade has a cost benefit over the previous version. Microsoft salespeople are as much responsible for this as end-user worries about version incompatibilities.
A parent who allows their children to use the 'net unsupervised.
I wouldn't allow any future off-spring the run of my local public library without supervision, there are books there documenting all kinds of truly horrific things. I think the same should be said more frequently about the Internet. Technology is not the answer. Better Internet education and awareness for parents is.
I know Wine Is Not Emulator. I think that's why I see it as a dead platform for running existing Windows apps. (see other posts) however, using WINE's libraries for cross-platform development makes perfect sense and I imagine will be of great help to the free software community.
Good point. I must eat more fish or increase my vitamin levels or something, I can't beleive I overlooked that;-). But point still stands when it comes to existing Windows users.
I'm not really sure of any documentation of emulation in itself but the following are free and fairly well documented:
Bochs, the IA-32 x86 emulator, intereting because it really is a software PC.Unix Amiga Emulator and Windows Unix Amiga Emulator are both interesting because they are running totally alien machines. Incedently if you can get hold of the required Kickstart ROMS (very easy on Google allegedly), there are huge number of Amiga Games now legally in the public domain. Being a skinflint and an ex-Amiga owner this has saved me having to buy a PC game for a few months now.
Heh. Well, sometimes the users should get knotted. Cat'o'nine tails made from Cat-9 should do the trick. Y-O-U--W-I-L-L--U-S-E--L-I-N-U-X and if you dare to call me again I shall beat you some more.
But seriously, you can make NT4 run full screen mode in Bochs and VMWare, kind of defeats the object though. If only end-users knew their ass from their elbow;-) and CAT-9 'o' nine tails were legally acceptable in offices.
I didn't know that Win4Lin used Merge as its base. Interesting, I had a discussion with one of the top SCO persons about four years ago and they didn't want to port it to Linux and considered Linux a poorly engineered system. Never mind, looks as though they came round eventually.
Incedently I have run Office successfully under Wine. The setup documentation is a bit of a bitch though. Whilst I realise that there is more than one way to do things I only want to do one. Get the bloody thing working with Baldurs Gate! So far unsuccessfully.
Does a Windows system forceyou to upgrade to the latest Windows system by only making critical fixes in the next version? Besides I would argue a totally neutral OS policy is best.
The only advantage of WINE that I can see is the performance. Most virtual machines have a performance hit. A virtual machine emulating say a PC or Amiga will be machine code compatible with the underlying OS of the program you want to run.
Another point is that with you example for instance you could run your existing setup, Windows NT4 as well in a Window on a Linux desktop. No retraining, just click your box and your old desktop is available.
Understood, but what if your existing software is cutting edge?
I would argue that a Virtual Machine solves any problems because it emulates hardware as opposed to software. Therefore if the said software (say XP or even Plan 9) is compatible with the hardware, there shouldn't be any problems.
It seems to me that all we'll ever be able to run on Wine is old Windows applications. Any cutting edge applications will not run unless the said app. maintains strict adherence to a old proprietary standard. This means that Wine will always be one step back.
Virtual Machines such as Bochs and VM-Ware will eventually be the only choice for running x86 applications.
Incedently VMWare and Bochs are not new concepts. SCO have had something called Merge for ages, which has allowed people to run Windows on Openserver for years now and more recently allowed Unixware users to do the same.
Wine's forking is a desperately sad attempt to remain as near to the cutting edge in legally grey DMCA infested waters. Virtual Machines and emulators are the way to go, DMCA be dammned.
I'm sorry but unless the next installment is substantially thicker on plot I'm going to view it with the same level of dissapointment that The Matrix gave me.
I don't understand what, if anything, was so great about the original, it was a light version of half a dozen sci-fi/cyber punk novels and not at all derivative in a good way. But, that said,in many ways I guess it is a good *light* introduction into the cyber punk genre, and if it opens up the genre to people who don't dig cyber punk novels/new science fiction it can only be a good thing.
But in a nutshell I'm downbeat with people seeing the Matrix as the be-all-and-end-all of cyberpunk, read Neuromancer or even Idoru or Ian M. Banks and countless others, far better thought out, twice as much depth and no surf-dude meets lamer playing the lead role. All of the religous and moral aspects of the Matrix are dire, superficial and designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
So please, please, not a slightly differenct clone of the original. I hope the screen play writers spend a few weeks swotting up on what is current in new science fiction instead of concentrating on *just* old hat.
It'd probably wipe out the need for Direct X and other hardware abstraction libraries. Apart from that who knows? Chromatic Lab's had an all in one chipset for the PC called the MPACT chipsed but unfortunately they bombed. The MPACT II was particularly interesting, it had its own bytecode and could be re-programmed for lots of different functions. The present owners won't release any of the programming details for copyright reasons, which is a bummer because X etc. has to be run using the Framebuffer driver and the Windows drivers are very old.
Thanks I was trying to remember the name. I did think of Suzanne but discounted it as silly, for some reason I couldn't get the name Denise out of my head, but I remember that Denise was the name of on of the ECS chipsets IIRC.
Another historical excess. King Henry VIII was keen on things like that, probably tasted of borage or whatever other herbs they used at the time.
There were Indian recipes like this too; a few centuries ago a dish was cooked up for the Indian royals. It composed of an ox stuffed with a goat, stuffed with a hare or rabbit stuffed with a peahen, stuffed with a quail which was finally stuffed with a finch. Each animal was de-boned in one piece, then marinaded in a different spice sauce and then roasted. To serve it was sliced crossways.
This is insane. There are far more interesting things to do with old computers, I read recently that someone built an Amiga laptop. Which is odd because Amiga never built anything other than desktops and they were converting the A600 consumer model. OK, obscure example. But...
Why not try something similarly imaginitive with old Macs? It would be interesting to see what a machine code programmer and some control outputs could do. Certainly automate a bedroom at least. Replacing it with a PC is dull and an old Mac is far cheaper than a 68000 based embedded development board and better documented than a lot of embedded developement boards. Re-program, skew, take out of context but don't ditch the heart and soul of the machine.
If you want a wacky case take up shop lessons and learn to work metal, don't destroy the past (with some effort and time spent).
I would have thought that the system would have been designed with the worst case scenario firmly in mind and had I not seen the article I would have thought it a hoax story. However I am ashamed to say that I have seen so many single points of failure while doing consulting work, that the whole article is another depressing reminder of the 'it won't happen to me syndrome'.
Should have critical path analysis and worse case scenarios inherent in the design of the system as a whole as opposed to individual object security. I.E. don't just spend time securing the machines electronically but also ask what happens if someone boots down the door and steals the machines or if someone leaves the server room door open with a brick (I have once seen this). A more holistic view perhaps.
I find the trend towards simulations of real life interesting. Does anyone else remember space simulations such as Elite? In a nutshell they were science fiction simulations. Isn't it odd that as computing power has increased more and more real life situations and systems are been simulated! Sim-this, Sim-that, Sim-U, Sim-Pets etc..
I wonder if there'll be a Sim-Slasdot, where you have to manage revenue over costs and keep the mods in line;-).
So you increase your computing power and instead of simulating unreality, you simulate existing reality (albeit someone elses), there has got to be something backward.
The amiga had soft reboots and hard reboots. The problem with soft reboots were that some memory was purposely left unblanked (usefull sometimes), the problem with this was that viruses like 'Lamer Exterminator' and 'Saddam' took advantage of the fact and a soft reboot didn't remove them from memory.
So scale the memory and CPU power acording to Moores law and you have something similar to that the Amiga did in 1985. Not to mention Kickstart, think PC BIOS but with further abstraction and what about suspended PCs?
I ambivalent about this. I did a paper on something similar last year and a few of the bigger dictionary makers were really interested. My idea was to use a Thesaurus like system to weight words and sentances, so that sentences could be broken into smaller metric products (a la Decartes). In theory it works quite well but I haven't had time other than the scratch pad paper. But I think that the language comprehension problem can and will be solved. I don't see that as the problem.
Now IMHO the real problem: Dictionary companies, publishers and Universities are the big players in this area. If Oxford University were to give away their dictionary a project would instantly have a massive base of words to work with, but would they? More to the point if they did could this be repeated internationally? I'm loathed to rely on the descriptions given by the unwashed masses;-), but seriously a strong linguistic and academic base is essential and that is where the Wolverhampton system may do well.
Lacklider also did a lot of papers on this in the 1960s, Xerox PARC did huge amounts of research and lots of other people including myself have worked (http://www.freesoftware.fsf.org/cdf/) on this problem. What I will say is that although lots of us have worked on it there are very few working systems (mind works a little but needs huge developement), if these guys succeed it is good for us all.
Slashdot Mirror
Scotland is dotted with US and UK airbases. It's quite possible the sightings are just bog standard military jets flying at high altitude.
- John
Yes, the version incompatibilities add to the end-users decision process. I disagree with the figure of 99% of users wouldn't of changed.
Do not forget the sales and marketing clout of Microsoft. Many companies buy on the basis that they are told that they need an upgrade or that they beleive the upgrade has a cost benefit over the previous version. Microsoft salespeople are as much responsible for this as end-user worries about version incompatibilities.
One point. Surely if you're already running Windows applications you'd already have a license for Windows?
A parent who allows their children to use the 'net unsupervised.
I wouldn't allow any future off-spring the run of my local public library without supervision, there are books there documenting all kinds of truly horrific things. I think the same should be said more frequently about the Internet. Technology is not the answer. Better Internet education and awareness for parents is.
I know Wine Is Not Emulator. I think that's why I see it as a dead platform for running existing Windows apps. (see other posts) however, using WINE's libraries for cross-platform development makes perfect sense and I imagine will be of great help to the free software community.
Exactly what I would have said ;-).
Good point. I must eat more fish or increase my vitamin levels or something, I can't beleive I overlooked that ;-). But point still stands when it comes to existing Windows users.
I'm not really sure of any documentation of emulation in itself but the following are free and fairly well documented:
Bochs, the IA-32 x86 emulator, intereting because it really is a software PC.Unix Amiga Emulator and Windows Unix Amiga Emulator are both interesting because they are running totally alien machines. Incedently if you can get hold of the required Kickstart ROMS (very easy on Google allegedly), there are huge number of Amiga Games now legally in the public domain. Being a skinflint and an ex-Amiga owner this has saved me having to buy a PC game for a few months now.
Anyway. Good luck.
Heh. Well, sometimes the users should get knotted. Cat'o'nine tails made from Cat-9 should do the trick. Y-O-U--W-I-L-L--U-S-E--L-I-N-U-X and if you dare to call me again I shall beat you some more.
;-) and CAT-9 'o' nine tails were legally acceptable in offices.
But seriously, you can make NT4 run full screen mode in Bochs and VMWare, kind of defeats the object though. If only end-users knew their ass from their elbow
I didn't know that Win4Lin used Merge as its base. Interesting, I had a discussion with one of the top SCO persons about four years ago and they didn't want to port it to Linux and considered Linux a poorly engineered system. Never mind, looks as though they came round eventually.
Incedently I have run Office successfully under Wine. The setup documentation is a bit of a bitch though. Whilst I realise that there is more than one way to do things I only want to do one. Get the bloody thing working with Baldurs Gate! So far unsuccessfully.
Does a Windows system forceyou to upgrade to the latest Windows system by only making critical fixes in the next version? Besides I would argue a totally neutral OS policy is best.
The only advantage of WINE that I can see is the performance. Most virtual machines have a performance hit. A virtual machine emulating say a PC or Amiga will be machine code compatible with the underlying OS of the program you want to run.
Another point is that with you example for instance you could run your existing setup, Windows NT4 as well in a Window on a Linux desktop. No retraining, just click your box and your old desktop is available.
Understood, but what if your existing software is cutting edge?
I would argue that a Virtual Machine solves any problems because it emulates hardware as opposed to software. Therefore if the said software (say XP or even Plan 9) is compatible with the hardware, there shouldn't be any problems.
It seems to me that all we'll ever be able to run on Wine is old Windows applications. Any cutting edge applications will not run unless the said app. maintains strict adherence to a old proprietary standard. This means that Wine will always be one step back.
Virtual Machines such as Bochs and VM-Ware will eventually be the only choice for running x86 applications.
Incedently VMWare and Bochs are not new concepts. SCO have had something called Merge for ages, which has allowed people to run Windows on Openserver for years now and more recently allowed Unixware users to do the same.
Wine's forking is a desperately sad attempt to remain as near to the cutting edge in legally grey DMCA infested waters. Virtual Machines and emulators are the way to go, DMCA be dammned.
I'm sorry but unless the next installment is substantially thicker on plot I'm going to view it with the same level of dissapointment that The Matrix gave me.
,in many ways I guess it is a good *light* introduction into the cyber punk genre, and if it opens up the genre to people who don't dig cyber punk novels/new science fiction it can only be a good thing.
I don't understand what, if anything, was so great about the original, it was a light version of half a dozen sci-fi/cyber punk novels and not at all derivative in a good way. But, that said
But in a nutshell I'm downbeat with people seeing the Matrix as the be-all-and-end-all of cyberpunk, read Neuromancer or even Idoru or Ian M. Banks and countless others, far better thought out, twice as much depth and no surf-dude meets lamer playing the lead role. All of the religous and moral aspects of the Matrix are dire, superficial and designed to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
So please, please, not a slightly differenct clone of the original. I hope the screen play writers spend a few weeks swotting up on what is current in new science fiction instead of concentrating on *just* old hat.
It'd probably wipe out the need for Direct X and other hardware abstraction libraries. Apart from that who knows? Chromatic Lab's had an all in one chipset for the PC called the MPACT chipsed but unfortunately they bombed. The MPACT II was particularly interesting, it had its own bytecode and could be re-programmed for lots of different functions. The present owners won't release any of the programming details for copyright reasons, which is a bummer because X etc. has to be run using the Framebuffer driver and the Windows drivers are very old.
Thanks I was trying to remember the name. I did think of Suzanne but discounted it as silly, for some reason I couldn't get the name Denise out of my head, but I remember that Denise was the name of on of the ECS chipsets IIRC.
Lol. I wouldn't mind trying it though.
Another historical excess. King Henry VIII was keen on things like that, probably tasted of borage or whatever other herbs they used at the time.
There were Indian recipes like this too; a few centuries ago a dish was cooked up for the Indian royals. It composed of an ox stuffed with a goat, stuffed with a hare or rabbit stuffed with a peahen, stuffed with a quail which was finally stuffed with a finch. Each animal was de-boned in one piece, then marinaded in a different spice sauce and then roasted. To serve it was sliced crossways.
This is insane. There are far more interesting things to do with old computers, I read recently that someone built an Amiga laptop. Which is odd because Amiga never built anything other than desktops and they were converting the A600 consumer model. OK, obscure example. But...
Why not try something similarly imaginitive with old Macs? It would be interesting to see what a machine code programmer and some control outputs could do. Certainly automate a bedroom at least. Replacing it with a PC is dull and an old Mac is far cheaper than a 68000 based embedded development board and better documented than a lot of embedded developement boards. Re-program, skew, take out of context but don't ditch the heart and soul of the machine.
If you want a wacky case take up shop lessons and learn to work metal, don't destroy the past (with some effort and time spent).
I would have thought that the system would have been designed with the worst case scenario firmly in mind and had I not seen the article I would have thought it a hoax story. However I am ashamed to say that I have seen so many single points of failure while doing consulting work, that the whole article is another depressing reminder of the 'it won't happen to me syndrome'.
Should have critical path analysis and worse case scenarios inherent in the design of the system as a whole as opposed to individual object security. I.E. don't just spend time securing the machines electronically but also ask what happens if someone boots down the door and steals the machines or if someone leaves the server room door open with a brick (I have once seen this). A more holistic view perhaps.
I find the trend towards simulations of real life interesting. Does anyone else remember space simulations such as Elite? In a nutshell they were science fiction simulations. Isn't it odd that as computing power has increased more and more real life situations and systems are been simulated! Sim-this, Sim-that, Sim-U, Sim-Pets etc..
;-).
I wonder if there'll be a Sim-Slasdot, where you have to manage revenue over costs and keep the mods in line
So you increase your computing power and instead of simulating unreality, you simulate existing reality (albeit someone elses), there has got to be something backward.
The Amiga had a very similar feature.
The amiga had soft reboots and hard reboots.
The problem with soft reboots were that some memory was purposely left unblanked (usefull sometimes), the problem with this was that viruses like 'Lamer Exterminator' and 'Saddam' took advantage of the fact and a soft reboot didn't remove them from memory.
So scale the memory and CPU power acording to Moores law and you have something similar to that the Amiga did in 1985. Not to mention Kickstart, think PC BIOS but with further abstraction and what about suspended PCs?
An interesting page that talks about some other Star Wars influenced stuff in a far less sensationalist way:
http://www.jitterbug.com/origins/other.html
I ambivalent about this. I did a paper on something similar last year and a few of the bigger dictionary makers were really interested. My idea was to use a Thesaurus like system to weight words and sentances, so that sentences could be broken into smaller metric products (a la Decartes). In theory it works quite well but I haven't had time other than the scratch pad paper. But I think that the language comprehension problem can and will be solved. I don't see that as the problem.
;-), but seriously a strong linguistic and academic base is essential and that is where the Wolverhampton system may do well.
Now IMHO the real problem: Dictionary companies, publishers and Universities are the big players in this area. If Oxford University were to give away their dictionary a project would instantly have a massive base of words to work with, but would they? More to the point if they did could this be repeated internationally? I'm loathed to rely on the descriptions given by the unwashed masses
Lacklider also did a lot of papers on this in the 1960s, Xerox PARC did huge amounts of research and lots of other people including myself have worked (http://www.freesoftware.fsf.org/cdf/) on this problem. What I will say is that although lots of us have worked on it there are very few working systems (mind works a little but needs huge developement), if these guys succeed it is good for us all.
So good luck Wolverhampton!