Actually that doesn't explain why you can't run VMware in VMware. VMware provides a virtual protected mode x86 (for x>=3), which is what is necessary to run 32-bit Windows, Linux, etc. However, they must have not quite completely implemented the virtual protected mode; if they had, VMware would work fine running under VMware,
just like VM/370 under VM/370.
What it does explain is why VMware doesn't run on the Alpha, Sparc, MIPS, ARM, PowerPC, etc.
If you run Bochs on another processor, you should be able to run VMware or Plex86 on that.
'Reformat the hard drive and fire
the person who installed that renegade operating system'
I've never worked anywhere where an IT manager would have had the power to fire me (or get me fired) for anything less than deliberate disruption of the company network.
In fact, at several companies I worked for, where Linux was definitely disapproved and IT was pissed off that I was running it, if the IT manager had pulled the stunt suggested by that quote (reformatting my hard drive), I likely could have gotten the IT manager fired, since I could have easily shown that such an act resulted in the destruction of valuable company property.
A good IT manager does not view the users as the enemy. If an employee is running an unapproved operating system (or any unapproved software), but does not cause a disruption for anyone else, a good IT manager will let that employee (and perhaps his or her manager) know that he can't expect any support out of IT, but that as long as he doesn't cause problems he can keep running it.
If the employee's use of unapproved software does cause problems, or prevents that employee or other employees from doing their jobs effectively, then IT can get the employee's manager to intervene.
At one company I've worked for, every time anything went wrong on the network, IT tried to blame it on my machine, but in every case it was in fact determined to be a configuration error on their NT servers. For instance, at one point my
machine was getting the same IP address as someone else's, so neither of us could use the network. IT claimed that the DHCP client in Red Hat Linux was broken, and assigned me a static IP address (becase they knew my manager wouldn't let them force me to run Windows). Afterwards, however, the same problem occurred with other people who were only running Windows. It turns out that in the interest of redundancy they were running two DHCP servers, but they were serving up overlapping ranges of IP addresses.
Then, months later, another IP address conflict occurred between my machine and a Windows machine.
They were all set to blame Linux again, when I found out that they had expanded the DHCP pool to include several previously assigned static IP addresses.
After that they seemed to realize that I knew what I was doing, and that rather than trying to blame me for network problems, they should have me help
out.
Therefore this technology will be suppressed and nothing will ever come of it.
Yeah! And if it weren't for the conspiracy, we
wouldn't still be using room-sized computers made
with tens of thousands of discrete transistors.
Instead someone would have figured out how to
fabricate hundreds of millions of transistors on
a single piece of silicon, and there would be some computers so small you could carry them around with you. And there would probably be some giant computer network to allow us to spread our conspiracy theories to everyone!
But unfortunately, due to the conspiracy, we'll never get this kind of technology.:-(
Hey, if spending a few hundred (or even a few thousand) dollars on designing and manufacturing patches helps with employee morale, I'm all in favor of it. The last thing we need is NASA employees going postal.
I suppose you probably complain about your employer wasting money on T-shirts for the employees, too.
Contrary to what the KDE developers claim, Stallman has a valid point. Sure, the Qt license change means that there is no GPL license violation now. But it doesn't change the fact that there was a violation in the past.
Why does this matter? Because section 4 of the GPL says that if you copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the work other than as provided in the license, your rights to the work are terminated. It does not say that your rights are reinstated later if you fix the problem. In other words, the KDE group's rights to the GPL'd code in question were terminated in the past, and need to be reinstated if they want to continue using any of that code.
My reading of Stallman's statement is not that he was demanding that anyone beg and grovel, but that we was generously agreeing to reinstate any such rights on software owned by the FSF.
I think people on both sides of this issue are far too thin-skinned and too quick to attack.
Your random internet appliance doesn't need a routable IP.
It does need to be a routable address, or it won't be of much bloody use. If I can't query it from work or on the road, it's not really an internet appliance.
To make a new computer or robot, now we need a huge amount of infrastructure
Once we have sufficiently advanced nanotechnology,
it becomes much easier. It's the bootstrapping that's difficult. It's also unclear whether building a nanotech universal constructor requires a solution to the strong AI problem.
The Immortality Option (fiction) by James P. Hogan - but first read the prior book in the series, Code of the Lifemaker, which is out of print, so you'll have to visit a used bookstore.
I think that network
television will remain a 4:3 picture and the networks will use the remaining space to run target banner advertising during
the show.
That would be so obnoxious that I don't think it will happen. If one network did it and another didn't, the viewers would flock the one that didn't. The programming would have to be incredibly compelling in order to hold any viewers. I'd give up watching my favorite shows (The Simpsons and Futurama) if they did this.
Personally I think that they should have just
focused on creating a fast functional browser, made it very modular and OO to add in porting to other platforms and
released it.
Re:I have given up on Mozilla/Netscape
on
Mozilla M17 Is Out
·
· Score: 2
OK everyone, repeat after me, "HTML describes content not layout".
False. If that were true, there wouldn't be width and height tags in the official HTML specification.
It's all well and good to claim that HTML is not primarily intended to describe layout, but the fact is that a lot of layout-related tags are in there, because in the real world it was necessary.
Nowdays CSS is preferred, but until the layout-related tags are actually removed from the HTML standard, a standard-compliant browser should render them properly.
that had the SAME FUNCTION but were developed independently.
There seems to be a lot of confusion over what a trade secret is, and what protection it affords.
If someone comes up with code that has the same function but was developed independently (even by reverse-engineering), they aren't infringing a trade secret. (If they copy code literally, they may be infringing a copyright, but that's an entirely different matter.)
A trade secret is infringed when someone who is privy to the secret divulges it to another party without authorization of the owner of the trade secret.
If I invent a new lawnmower mechanism, and choose to keep the details of how it works as a trade secret (rather than, for instance, applying for a patent), anyone who is not privy to my trade secret can legally purchase the lawnmower, disassemble it, figure out how it works, and build comparable lawnmowers of their own. This woul dnot infringe my trade secret.
But if I have an employee, perhaps a person on the assembly line, who is privy to my trade secret, and he posts the information on a web site (or otherwise disseminates it to unauthorized persons), he has infringed the trade secret, and the people to whom he disseminated the information might be in posession of stolen property.
Of course not - it still has all the debugging code in there, and they haven't even STARTED optimization of the code yet.
Performance isn't something that you take care of at the last minute. It has to be planned. Sure, some last-minute optimization can speed things up a little bit, but in a large software system if don't plan for efficiency you end up with a fundmentally inefficient architecture, for which no amount of optimization will suffice.
I strongly hope that Mozilla doesn't suffer from inherent architectural inefficiencies, and I certainly haven't studied the code myself to be able to assess that, but it shows most of the outward signs of it that I've seen in other large projects.
Yes, but in this case people did suffer actual problems with the device. It's not some vague theoretical thing that doesn't happen in practice.
Class-action suits in general often do not really work out to significantly compensate the harmed party, but even so they form an important deterrent to prevent companies from deliberately producing shoddy products.
You seem to be suggesting that people should not take advantage of this settlement, because the lawyers profit from it. I'm no fan of lawyers, but they're going to make their money whether the people who were harmed collect or not.
This product uses a new format MD with a capacity of 650MB (same as 74-minute CDR). That's how they get 20 minutes of MPEG-2 audio onto it. Presumably they're using around 4 Mbit/second encoding for 20-minute mode, and 8 Mbit/second for the 10-minute high quality mode.
It would be nice if they offered an inexpensive MD-Data drive for this new 650M format, but somehow it seems unlikely, since they thought that people would pay over $700 for the original MD-Data drive. Sometimes it boggles my mind that a company with such superb engineering talent can have such idiots in marketing. Wait a minute, that sounds just like most companies I've worked for or dealt with; I guess it's not so mind-boggling after all.
That was true of the first generation of DVHS records, but from the description on the Philips web site, it sounds like this one has an MPEG 2 encoder and decoder built in. And since it accepts input from DV camcorders as well, it must either transcode the DV format (basically motion JPEG) into MPEG 2, or else decode DV on playback.
It could easily take a decade just to code an AI once you've figured how, regardless of the resources available.)
Or a century, or a millenium. Ray specifically suggests other ways to produce AI than by a bunch of clever people writing oodles of code. Read the book.
I was simply saying that compsci people tend to know just enough about neuroscience to get everything wrong, and then follow in AI's grand tradition of making bold statements based on those errors.
I'm simply saying that you should read his book *before* you jump to the conclusion that he doesn't understand these issues. I'm no expert, but after reading the book it is clear to me that he has in fact studied exactly the things that you seem to think he hasn't.
We don't even know if the brain can be characterized as a computer, let alone how powerful it maybe be.
If you read Ray's book, you'll find that he is not claiming that a computer that is a simple extension of what we make now (i.e, a Pentium XXVI/400THz) running software we write the way we do today (i.e., Windows 2020) will be intelligent.
However, just because the brain is not structured and does not function like the computers we build today, does not in any way preclude our developing different machines in the future (which may or may not be called "computers") that can function in the same manner as the brain, or perhaps in an altogether different manner that nevertheless is "intelligent".
Maybe I'll send Ray a copy of Biophysics of Computation and see if changes his estimate.
Not a bad idea. But in addition, maybe you should read his boot, The Age of Spiritual Machines, and see if it changes your estimate.
It is clear that no digital machine can accurately emulate a Large Poincare System and (by Lucas' Theorem that no deterministic automaton can accurately emulate the human mind.
Lucas' Theorem only applies to Deterministic Logical Systems. A digital machine (or computer) does not of necessity have to be a Deterministic Logical System. Computers are currently designed to be deterministic because there are many desirable properties of deterministic systems. However, there are also desirable properties of nondeterminisitic systems, and there is nothing that precludes development of nondeterministic digital machines.
Slashdot Mirror
What it does explain is why VMware doesn't run on the Alpha, Sparc, MIPS, ARM, PowerPC, etc.
If you run Bochs on another processor, you should be able to run VMware or Plex86 on that.
In fact, at several companies I worked for, where Linux was definitely disapproved and IT was pissed off that I was running it, if the IT manager had pulled the stunt suggested by that quote (reformatting my hard drive), I likely could have gotten the IT manager fired, since I could have easily shown that such an act resulted in the destruction of valuable company property.
A good IT manager does not view the users as the enemy. If an employee is running an unapproved operating system (or any unapproved software), but does not cause a disruption for anyone else, a good IT manager will let that employee (and perhaps his or her manager) know that he can't expect any support out of IT, but that as long as he doesn't cause problems he can keep running it. If the employee's use of unapproved software does cause problems, or prevents that employee or other employees from doing their jobs effectively, then IT can get the employee's manager to intervene.
At one company I've worked for, every time anything went wrong on the network, IT tried to blame it on my machine, but in every case it was in fact determined to be a configuration error on their NT servers. For instance, at one point my machine was getting the same IP address as someone else's, so neither of us could use the network. IT claimed that the DHCP client in Red Hat Linux was broken, and assigned me a static IP address (becase they knew my manager wouldn't let them force me to run Windows). Afterwards, however, the same problem occurred with other people who were only running Windows. It turns out that in the interest of redundancy they were running two DHCP servers, but they were serving up overlapping ranges of IP addresses.
Then, months later, another IP address conflict occurred between my machine and a Windows machine. They were all set to blame Linux again, when I found out that they had expanded the DHCP pool to include several previously assigned static IP addresses.
After that they seemed to realize that I knew what I was doing, and that rather than trying to blame me for network problems, they should have me help out.
But unfortunately, due to the conspiracy, we'll never get this kind of technology. :-(
I suppose you probably complain about your employer wasting money on T-shirts for the employees, too.
Why does this matter? Because section 4 of the GPL says that if you copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the work other than as provided in the license, your rights to the work are terminated. It does not say that your rights are reinstated later if you fix the problem. In other words, the KDE group's rights to the GPL'd code in question were terminated in the past, and need to be reinstated if they want to continue using any of that code.
My reading of Stallman's statement is not that he was demanding that anyone beg and grovel, but that we was generously agreeing to reinstate any such rights on software owned by the FSF.
I think people on both sides of this issue are far too thin-skinned and too quick to attack.
Suggested reading:
It's all well and good to claim that HTML is not primarily intended to describe layout, but the fact is that a lot of layout-related tags are in there, because in the real world it was necessary.
Nowdays CSS is preferred, but until the layout-related tags are actually removed from the HTML standard, a standard-compliant browser should render them properly.
If someone comes up with code that has the same function but was developed independently (even by reverse-engineering), they aren't infringing a trade secret. (If they copy code literally, they may be infringing a copyright, but that's an entirely different matter.)
A trade secret is infringed when someone who is privy to the secret divulges it to another party without authorization of the owner of the trade secret.
If I invent a new lawnmower mechanism, and choose to keep the details of how it works as a trade secret (rather than, for instance, applying for a patent), anyone who is not privy to my trade secret can legally purchase the lawnmower, disassemble it, figure out how it works, and build comparable lawnmowers of their own. This woul dnot infringe my trade secret.
But if I have an employee, perhaps a person on the assembly line, who is privy to my trade secret, and he posts the information on a web site (or otherwise disseminates it to unauthorized persons), he has infringed the trade secret, and the people to whom he disseminated the information might be in posession of stolen property.
I strongly hope that Mozilla doesn't suffer from inherent architectural inefficiencies, and I certainly haven't studied the code myself to be able to assess that, but it shows most of the outward signs of it that I've seen in other large projects.
Class-action suits in general often do not really work out to significantly compensate the harmed party, but even so they form an important deterrent to prevent companies from deliberately producing shoddy products.
You seem to be suggesting that people should not take advantage of this settlement, because the lawyers profit from it. I'm no fan of lawyers, but they're going to make their money whether the people who were harmed collect or not.
It would be nice if they offered an inexpensive MD-Data drive for this new 650M format, but somehow it seems unlikely, since they thought that people would pay over $700 for the original MD-Data drive. Sometimes it boggles my mind that a company with such superb engineering talent can have such idiots in marketing. Wait a minute, that sounds just like most companies I've worked for or dealt with; I guess it's not so mind-boggling after all.
That was true of the first generation of DVHS records, but from the description on the Philips web site, it sounds like this one has an MPEG 2 encoder and decoder built in. And since it accepts input from DV camcorders as well, it must either transcode the DV format (basically motion JPEG) into MPEG 2, or else decode DV on playback.
I can't quite figure out what this has to do with Divx though. Oh well.
However, just because the brain is not structured and does not function like the computers we build today, does not in any way preclude our developing different machines in the future (which may or may not be called "computers") that can function in the same manner as the brain, or perhaps in an altogether different manner that nevertheless is "intelligent".
Not a bad idea. But in addition, maybe you should read his boot, The Age of Spiritual Machines, and see if it changes your estimate.IMHO, it's unfortunate that he didn't choose a different term that isn't overloaded with religious connotation.