The best way to fight terror is through humiliating the civil population. This is what the Israeli Defense Forces did at the Palestine Ministry of Culture. Check the details of modern warfare.
Posted on 06 May 2002
This week has been interesting.
We have been considering using a new intermediate representation for the JIT compiler in Mono because it was hard with the current framework to implement register allocation.
Dietmar has been researching the various options to move the JIT compiler to: a new intermediate representation was something we considered. Or a new "instruction scheduling" interface that would perform register allocation on "nodes" that would be semantically annotated.
This week, Dietmar had a massive breakthrough: he figured how to add spill/reloads to our current framework and flag the register usage, which allowed us to free registers (two currently) for other purposes. There was no noticeable performance degradation after this change (even without using those two registers).
Now work is moving along the lines of implementing linear register allocation (which is very fast to do, and is almost as good as register coloring).
Some friends came by the office to check out how Mono was doing, and I showed them the Mono C# compiler recompiling itself on Linux. My Linux machine runs at 650Mhz and my Windows desktop runs at 800Mhz.
Timing both compiles took the same ammount of time! It had been a while since I had compared both systems, but my Linux machine was just as fast as the Windows compile.
This is not really a scientific benchmark, as both systems are loaded (Evolution, Nautilus, Galeon with 20 or so web sites open, Gaim, 20 gnome-terminals in Linux; Media Player playing, 5 copies of IE, Gui .NET Debugger, Cygwin with bunch of remote sessions and Word Viewer on the C# spec).
Paolo points out that it might be related to the fact that our Reflection.Emit library is heavily optimized (he optimized this). Also, keep in mind that in the last few weeks a lot of improvements have been done to the Mono runtime by everyone. Ever since Paolo gave us profiling in the JIT, people have been going crazy tuning their code.
Still, the major speed boost for computation intensive code will likely come from deploying linear register allocation; Paolo's CMOV patches plus Sergey's CPU-detection code.
Patrik (totte) wants to contribute 64-bit specific support for PIII machines (now that he is working for Intel).
All in all, things are looking very bright for Mono.
Gonzalo reworked his ASP.NET parser this week to be a top-down predictive parser rather than the jay hack he used (I hever liked that approach anyways ;-). And we have some code generation going on now for ASP.NET pages.
Also Mike Kestner got some more demoable features in Gtk# this week, an interesting acomplishment because it will be our foundation for the System.Windows.Form implementation.
The hackers working on System.Data have gone crazy this week: Daniel Morgan, Duncan Mak, Rodrigo Moya and Tim Coleman have the Postgress backend for the Sql classes working (with nice test suite included ;-). Rodrigo and Gonzalo also got libGDA to be CORBA-free, so it is easier to use now as a wrappable library to implement the OleDB interfaces. So it is all very cool.
Thanks to Johannes, many people have been able to get Windows pre-compiled versions of Mono. This is pretty useful, as they can give it a try without having to download all the source code and all the development tools before they can use it (Cygwin mostly ;-).
A few people are very happy with what we have right now, and a lot of people are sad because we dont have more.
If you want to finance a particular area of Mono, get in touch with me ;-)
Posted on 05 May 2002
Today I got back to hack, and I managed to finish the dead code removal code in the compiler. I also started fixing some bugs that I started looking into this weekend.
More to come.
A simple definition of terrorism:
Fuzzy and ideological definitions of terrorism just make it easier to kill people. When you know your actions will kill innocent non-combatants, that's terrorism. And it must be clearly named as unacceptable - no matter who does it (individuals, groups, or states), and whatever the weapons, the expressed intentions, or political justifications. Deliberately taking the lives of innocent civilians must simply be morally condemned. That's a clear definition of terrorism and a beginning of resistance to it.
The West Bank Conflict in 3D. A set of picture essays by Architect Eyal Weizman. There is one new episode coming every day for seven days: 1 and 2 were the Maps; 3. Hills and Valleys; 4. West Bank Settlements; 5. From Water to Shit.
An article from linguist Tanya Reinhart from the university of Tel Aviv: Israel: The Generals' grand design
We still do not know what has happened in Jenin: but the Israeli
Occupation Forces provide us with to prove that nothing really happened.
A separate measurement of the destruction
by David Chandler
Very interesting site,
containing pictures of the occupation (before,
during
and after).
It comes with per-city pictures, testimonials, maps, and a
message board.
Chomsky makes a much better case explaining the issues than
the people on that web site.
Palestine Remembered
Posted on 30 Apr 2002
Dave Winer's essay Sharon Must Go
Debunking Six Common Israeli Myths.
If Microsoft's thinks that they can only innovate if they integrate third party products into the operating system, that tells you a lot about how little they know about innovation.
It seems more like they are closing their eyes to innovation. I understand that innovation might not be as profitable if you can not drive competitors out of the market, or if you do not bundle the products with the OS.
Everybody else (but the convicted monopolist) has to ship products which are not bundled with the OS. Why should Microsoft be given special treatment? Specially when two courts have found Microsoft guilty of abusing its monopoly.
Microsoft next step should be to strip out the OS from all the extra middle ware and sell those components separately. This is how the industry works today. Each component then has to be tested against the operating system, and cross-company and cross-product testing will have to happen.
Microsoft is one of the proponents of interface-based programming (as part of COM and now .NET) in which the implementation details are not relevant provided that the individual "components" follow the contract specified.
So everyone will have to develop using these contracts (Microsoft and third party people), and a chance for software to compete on the operating system level will happen: if you get a bare-bones operating system, where you purchase the extra components, we might get some competition in there, and people might be able to get different options.
Right now, Microsoft bundled products (CD burning, Media Player, Internet Explorer, the Movie software, MSN, WordPad, DVD playing (that does not work)) are 50% to 70% of what people need, not really worth spending the extra 69 dollars to get the full product.
Why dont we get a discount on that, and let people build their own solutions using the best components?
I consider myself a savvy user, but when it comes to using the "consumer XP", I have found that XP has all sorts of troubles playing my DVDs or having an intuitive interface (or even providing the options) to burn CDs.
I bought my XP machine so I could read the .NET documentation at home while I hack on my Linux laptop. After trying to use the XP machine for something more than a document browser, I was really dissapointed by how poor this OS is.
They got better icons now (of far lower quality than MacOS X and GNOME) and their file manager has some neat features, but I had to install Linux on the machine to play DVDs and burn CDs.
It was easier to find the device drivers on the net and recompile my kernel and try various DVD players than trying to get a coherent answer from my PC and DVD manufacturer and the Windows consumer OS.
No movies will ever be made of this account by reporters for the UK Independent on the Jenin massacre (which right now is being spinned quickly as `It did not happen')
Posted on 26 Apr 2002
The Guardian: Red Cross and Amnesty International say attack violated Geneva accords: Amnesty International concurred and called for an investigation on the same basis as the war crimes inquiries in the Balkans.
An account of Israel War Crimes in the past few days.
Like shooting an american young mother that was holding her 9-month old kid on her arms. Collateral damage. Maybe she had evil thoughts that had to be eliminated.
A Research Guide to the Palestine-Israeli conflict.
Work out your own conclussions.
why they had to do this? To demoralize the population:
Let's not deceive ourselves; this was not a mission to search and destroy the terrorist infrastructure. If the forces breaking into every hard disk of every bank and clinic, commercial consultant's office or PA ministry, thought that a list of weapons or wanted men was inside the disk, all they had to do was copy the information and pass it on to the Shin Bet. If they thought incriminating evidence was hidden in the Education Ministry and the International Bank of Palestine and in a shop that rents prosthetics, the soldiers would have examined document after document, and not thrown the files on the floor without opening them.
From here:
The globalization movement isn't anti-Semitic, it just hasn't fully confronted the implications of diving into the Middle East conflict. Most people on the left are simply choosing sides and in the Middle East, where one side is under occupation and the other has the U.S. military behind it, the choice seems clear. But it is possible to criticize Israel while forcefully condemning the rise of anti-Semitism.And it is equally possible to be pro-Palestinian independence without adopting a simplistic "pro-Palestinian/anti-Israel" dichotomy, a mirror image of the good-versus-evil equations so beloved by President George W. Bush.
Posted on 24 Apr 2002
Today I went to see my Fourth Noam Chomsky talk. He answered questions about the current (current?) crisis in Palestine.
Posted on 23 Apr 2002
The making of a suicide bomber: Diary of a 15 year old palestinian girl. In the meantime, a man watched his son die next to him.
Posted on 22 Apr 2002
The iTolet
Sharon states that the UN representative in the Middle East is a persona non-grata and has cut relationships with, after his statements yesterday about the situation in Jenin.
Posted on 21 Apr 2002
A great piece from Havoc on Free Software UI.
Not only he answers the question of user interface design in free software, but also some more organizational issues of a project of the size of Gnome
Hakam Kanafani is the CEO for Palestinian telecom company. He has a diary of the last two weeks.
My take: Palestinians will be erradicated from the region, this year, or in the next 30 years. It is Israel objective, (see the older links for the history of the conflict). Terrorism is just today's excuse.
If I were a Palestinian, I would just leave any land Israel claims to have divine rights to and move to a different country. Israel has no intention of any co-habitation in the area. The sooner people get out of there, the better for their families.
Today Alex said to me `If you have two groups of people who hate each other and one of them is going door by door looking for terrorists, what do you expect to happen?'
Of course, you have to wonder, how Apache missiles targeted at buildings in Jenin were supposed to hit a terrorist.
People are not allowed back in Jenin either (guess touching Jenin turns you into a terrorist), so they just shoot at them.
Posted on 20 Apr 2002
A blog about the activities of the hollywood lobbyists trying to take away our freedoms.
Posted on 19 Apr 2002