Microsoft comparing, apples to oranges when measuring itself against Linux.
Best quote, from a footnote in the advertisement: "Results may vary outside the United States"
Plenty of Mono activity in the past two weeks in the development branch (1.1.xx: we are using the same numbering scheme as the Linux kernel).
The new managed implementation of Windows.Forms is moving along (internally it uses Win32 messages and codes to help applications that hook up to Wndproc or use CreateParams), the hack-a-thon in Provo, Utah seems to have been a success.
Documentation of Gtk# is continuing at a rapid pace, and we will soon update the online version of the documentation.
Progress is underway on a few major components: Code Access Security (CAS) and the security related infrastructure for .NET 1.x and 2.x by Sebastien. Atsushi has been busy working on our XQuery implementation: a fairly large task but progress is advancing rapidly.
On the JIT side of things, the most important development are the s390 port morphing into s390x (to support the 64 bit machines of this kind) as well as the record-time port of Mono to the AMD64 platform. The AMD64 port was done by Zoltan and is the second 64-bit port of Mono (his SPARC v9 port being the first).
During my vacation plenty of micro optimizations were done to the JIT and Paolo has fixed the exception bug that made throwing exceptions several orders of magnitude slower than it should have (exposed by IronPython). Also Paolo is working on a new trampoline setup that will help the dynamic nature of IronPython as well as enabling some clever recompilation strategies. Also Massi continues work on our SSAPRE implementation, an effort that is on hold while he goes on a two week vacation.
Paolo has also checked in a few plans on changes that we want to make to our register allocator, you can find this on the Mono CVS repository in the mono module.
Martin continues to improve our generics compiler: just when he thought he was done, we received the C5 generics class libraries (which seems to be the largest body of generics code out there) and he is now fixing the bugs exposed by this.
The team in Bangalore continues work on the Basic compiler for Mono, and it is now possible to run simple ASP.NET applications with it. A Basic compiler is more important for ASP.NET 1.x as it does not support "pre-compiled" sites, so a compiler is required on the deployment machine. With ASP.NET 2.x we could eliminate this problem by having people pre-compile their sites and just deploy binaries on the target site.
Chris Toshok from the Evolution team (thanks JP!) will be assisting us with the debugger core in the next few months.
Induce Act: Just learned about the INDUCE Act another retarded law (plenty of coverage here.
Venezuela: Various readers raised an issue with my post about the Venezuelan election and said that if I do not document myself better I should not post to my blog about Chavez. That seems relatively fair, but it misses two points: Greg Palast is a man I respect for his investigative journalism.
But my readers missed a larger point: In fact I do not know enough to advocate a `yes' or `no' vote on the Chavez election (which I did not advocate), but that was not the point of my post. The point of my post was the fishyness of foreign intervention through ChoicePoint in the Venezuelan election. ChoicePoint was the same company involved in removing black-voters from the Florida elections in 2000 (documented also in the great book `The Best Democracy Money Can Buy').
One of my readers in the US claims that the oil production facilities in Venezuela are in the government power, Greg Palast disagrees.
I found out about the results of Chavez election while on vacation. And Greg Palast has a great follow up article.
Right now, the oil majors - like PhillipsConoco - keep 84% of the proceeds of the sale of Venezuela oil; the nation gets only 16%.Chavez wanted to double his Treasury's take to 30%. [...]
But to feed and house the darker folk in those bread and brick lines, Chavez would need funds, and the 16% slice of the oil pie wouldn't do it. So the President of Venezuela demanded 30%, leaving Big Oil only 70%. Suddenly, Bill Clinton's ally in Caracas became Mr. Cheney's -- and therefore, Mr. Bush's -- enemy.
So began the Bush-Cheney campaign to "Floridate" the will of the Venezuela electorate. It didn't matter that Chavez had twice won election. Winning most of the votes, said a White House spokesman, did not make Chavez' government "legitimate." Hmmm. Secret contracts were awarded by our Homeland Security spooks to steal official Venezuela voter lists. Cash passed discreetly from the US taxpayer, via the so-called 'Endowment for Democracy,' to the Chavez-haters running today's "recall" election.
In Mexico at least, it is illegal to receiving funds from an external country to influence the political process. The SI people might be right or wrong, but the whole thing leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
That being said, in Mexico there is an ongoing debate over the monies that funded Vicente's Fox election: a clever setup to bring funds from abroad into his political campaign is under scrutiny.
Dimona: A nice animation of the Dimona Nuclear Complex in Israel. Based on the pictures taken by Mordechai Vanunu and revealed in 1986.
Posted on 25 Aug 2004