Posts by Russell Jackson

VMware takes EMC 'beyond virtual servers'

marketdroid overload

Eventually the VMs will shrink until they're indistinguishable from what we traditionally think of as a process, and then we'll be right back where we started; except, this time instead of being locked into Windows, we'll be locked into VMOS.

FSF throws sueball at Cisco

@ Peter Gathercole

Dynamic linking to libraries can still result in a derived work if the linked library cannot be easily substituted for another non-GPL'ed library. In that case, the work does not stand on its own and the entire work would be considered to be derived.

VMware renders multitasking OSes redundant

VMware reinvents the process

Ah. So we come full circle. Why have duplicated operating systems and drivers when you can just write software against the "bare metal"? Avoiding writing applications directly against hardware (virtualized or not) is exactly why operating systems were invented in the first place. If VMware were to provide another abstraction layer for applications to run against directly, it'd just be yet another operating system with processes just implemented differently. The only cool thing would be the ability to migrate "processes" on the fly --which isn't a new idea either.

Personally, the reason why I use VMware is so I can run multiple _different_ operating systems without buying additional hardware. Having paravirtualized drivers is probably a good idea, but If you try to boil this down any further, we just wind up right back where we started before hardware virtualization.

Rather than rewrite all my applications to run under some uber VMware OS, why not just continue to run operating systems that already work, isolate processes using thing like BSD jails and Solaris Zones and implement dynamic process migration between machines.

COBOL thwarts California's Governator

Decreasing salaries

The problem isn't simply decreasing salaries; the problem is calculating back pay and taxes on said back pay after reinstating everyone's salary in the future. The code to handle that scenario simply isn't there. Doing it all by hand is obviously not realistic.

VMware admits 'time bomb' rolled past quality control

@Rob

Wow. You really bought into the industry propaganda. DRM has nothing to do with the rights of anybody but the publisher.

Run-time licensing is a form of DRM, and the expiration of said licensing due to a bug would definitely make this DRM related.