Ah, how sad. I am about to shut down the FTP server. This internet service has been the best I've experienced in all my time here.
Our first event for Smalltalk Solutions 2007 has just been announced. Boris Popov started a reservation for the window tables at the Hard Rock Cafe facing the Skydome field during a game night. Go to the Smalltalk World Tour wiki page to get instructions on how to sign up!
In the past, I have written many times that we, collectively considered as mankind, suck. And I think that overall we do suck because we just shy away from looking in the mirror especially when we know for a fact we will not like what we will see.
In my opinion, there are numerous things that justify the assertion. I do not think it is necessary to bring the most glaring examples up yet again, as we have come to interact with their consequences daily.
One recent example of how we just completely suck is all the garbage that has been thrown towards Kathy Sierra. It is completely unacceptable and I hope this kind of behavior is forcefully punished as specified by law.
I also think that if we use this as a mirror, it illustrates the state of our collective mind whether we like the results or not. Either some teenagers have absolutely zero idea as to how to behave properly around people, or some adults still behave like teenagers that have absolutely zero idea as to how to behave properly around people. Regardless of which is the case, our society is failing because it allows such things to happen way too frequently.
So... can we please get a hint as subtle as "you will not threaten to do harm to others"? That should be pretty obvious, right? Ok, evidently so it's not obvious. Therefore I expect law enforcement will find those responsible and that our justice system will apply the prescribed corrective action.
I think we should not allow these crimes to go unpunished, because if we do we become accomplices by negligence. Let's not suck for a change.
I briefly wrote about this in a footnote of a different post, and yet I felt it deserved proper treatment. Here we go.
In the past, I had discussions about what does it exactly mean when you say "program x is faster than program y by so much". Something that I noticed is that the speed of a program is sometimes not well understood.
For example, if you say Program A is 25% faster than Program B, what do you mean exactly? Here are some of the interpretations I have encountered:
The RIAA sued a lady alleging copyright infringement. When the lady countered with "show me evidence of infringement", the RIAA could not produce any and as such withdrew the suit.
So far so good, but it gets better. The lady then asked for attorney fees because the RIAA's suit was a bunch of BS. The RIAA said "ah no the amount she asks is ridiculous". Ah, how unfortunate for the RIAA... there's plenty of legal background that says that one way to determine how reasonable attorney costs claims are is to see how much the other side spent. The judge eventually got tired of the RIAA's games and ordered them to produce such records.
Ah but then such records would become public records...
Option A. RIAA's costs are negligible. Therefore they prove they don't prepare their cases at all. Horrible PR for everybody to see. Plus of course, it provides lovely legal reputation for everybody to bring up whenever they wish.
Option B. RIAA's costs are not negligible. Therefore, since they don't prepare their cases at all anyway (i.e.: suing without evidence), that's bad PR part one. Moreover, essentially anybody that is sued by the RIAA without proper evidence gets to claim reasonable attorney's fees as well. Therefore there is even worse PR: people now have a great incentive to strike back at their racketeering-like behavior.
Oh, by the way... since the RIAA initially refused to provide such records on bogus excuses and the issue had to be escalated through the court, the lady is also asking for attorney fees due to RIAA's lack of cooperation in assessing the reasonableness of her initial attorney fees claim. Lovely.
So my friend, what is the pain dial going to point at on March 26? Pain, or more pain?
While doing tests for the VisualWorks VM, I found that the performance was very unstable in multicore/multicpu boxes running Windows. Speed would swing by factors greater than 2, and there was quite a bit of jitter between runs.
It turns out that what is going on is that the Windows process scheduler frequently swaps the core/cpu for processes, leading to CPU cache thrashing. This apparently happens with any single threaded program.
What is a bit surprising to me is that, although this was not news to people dealing with highly technical implementation details, I do not remember reading anything about this in mainstream hardware review sites. Strangely, I do recall reading things like "only 5% performace degradation between single core and dual core at the same clock speed" instead. Did I missed the relevant article completely?
Well in any case, here is a preliminary workaround for the negative interaction between Windows' process scheduler and multicore/multicpu boxes. Simply get the utility imagecfg.exe from either the Resource Kits or SDKs from Windows and do this:
Hola! Smalltalk is indeed everywhere. One place where it has a very large community, and where a very interesting set of applications have come from, is Argentina. Here are two very good examples of this (text in Spanish):
