Squeak-dev April 2001

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165 participants
614 discussions

Squeak License
by Jimmie Houchin 27 Apr '01

27 Apr '01

Yes, I know this is a recurring theme in certain messages, but I would like to make a few comments. I believe it will continue to be a recurring theme with few answers until the license is rewritten. According to the license Apple owns the copyright to Squeak. According to some comments on the list Apple's rights are up to a point and then Disney owns the rights. Apple's license if very pre 1.x sounding. Considering Squeak is currently at 3.x it creates confusion and questions. If Apple is the copyright owner of the current version of Squeak it would be nice if Squeak were relicensed under a clearer license. If Disney owns the current copyright or can acquire such, it would be nice if Disney would update the license. If Disney it would be nice if they would license Squeak under a new Squeak license similar to their other open source projects such as Tea. http://opensource.go.com/license.html This license is based on Apache which I believe (from memory) is based on BSD. This would be a very business friendly move. I believe a relicensing of Squeak in such a manner would help encourage growth and adoption of Squeak. Thanks, Jimmie Houchin

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Re: [BUG]? movie player? open as menu?
by Dan Ingalls 27 Apr '01

27 Apr '01

John Hinsley <jhinsley(a)telinco.co.uk> wrote... >Yes, I get this and did the extra VMM. If Andreas is right (and that >pretty much explains things) then I guess *nix versions really need an >alternative message saying that movies can be created, but not run in >Unix Squeaks. (But this is a bit wierd as, as I've said, I can clearly >see the "movie" as it's being made). It may be that I can play around >with the creation method to get a display method (although it won't be a >movie). > >In this I'm just doing some preparatory playing about looking for a way >to display a jubilant dancing figure who has just escaped the noose -- >as in the java Hang Duke applet. If you or anyone else is interested, it should be quite simple to fake async access on *nix with a synchronous implementation. At the worst it should only slow things down by a factor of two. This could be used until the async primitives get implemented there. Also, for this particular application, you might want to consider a nice compact little bit of Flash. - Dan

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ARGH! 3.0 Plug-in Download
by Jochen F. Rick 27 Apr '01

27 Apr '01

I always hate it when computers decide that I shouldn't be allowed to do something, especially when I know what I'm doing. This is a terrible way to treat your users. Shame. I went to squeakland.org to download the 3.0 Squeak plug-in. It detected that my browser was iCab2.5 and that therefore I am not able to use the plug-in. This is wrong. iCab is able to use Netscape plug-ins. The proper respect-for-the-user way to handle this is for it to say "Oops. I don't recognize that browser. Here are all the browser plug-ins that you can download and the corresponding conditions I think are necessary for you to use them. My recommendation is that you download one of the 'standard' (ie. evil) browsers. If not, here's what's available." Peace and Luck! Je77

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Re: Newsweek article on "Dynabook-like" computer
by Roger Vossler 27 Apr '01

27 Apr '01

Hi Gang, Speaking of a stylus, I understand that Squeak currently has support for a small graphics tablet. True or false? If true, which ones? Cheers, Roger..... Alan Kay wrote: > > Well, as Andreas pointed out, one really needs a keyboard as part of the idea. > If you look at the earliest photograph of the cardboard model from 1968, you > will see that it has a keyboard -- harder to see is the stylus which is > embedded in the side. These considerations came from a fair amount of use of > both GRAIL at RAND (a completely penbased system with a great realtime [snip]

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Different Forks for Different Folks
by Roger Vossler 27 Apr '01

27 Apr '01

Hi Gang, Assuming for a moment that it is even desirable to fork Squeak, I would much rather see it fork along problem domains rather than along the lines of an operating environment. IMNSHO, the world needs another round of Solaris vs HPUX vs AIX vs MaxOS X vs BSDI vs NetBSD vs FreeBsd vs GNU/Linux vs all of the other flavors of U**X like we need more holes in our heads. There is even evidence of this madness in the Smalltalk world. :-) Instead, I would rather see a Medical Squeak, a Music Squeak, a Movie Squeak, an Engineering Squeak, a Scientific Squeak, a Web Squeak, a Collaborative Squeak, etc., etc., etc. Each of these implementations would be optimized toward particular problem domains, and yet, share some common elements, depending upon the domain. [Of course, there could even be a Lawyer Squeak, that is, one that bites you in the ass when you turn it on. (Sorry about that. :-) ) ] Each of these various implementations of Squeak could remain relatively small with real performance, yet serve the needs of a particular problem domain quite well. During a recent visit to my doctor's office, the RN behind the desk was struggling with a software package designed to support a physician's office. "Having a problem?", I innocently asked. She snorted and with a look of utter disgust said, "Whoever designed this piece of crap knew nothing about how we do our jobs around here!" I nodded in sympathy, took my seat to await my appointment, and hoped that my doctor was in a better mood. I declined to identify myself as a computer engineer, because I flashed on an image of this RN taking my blood sample with a needle the size of a screwdriver. Not that she would, of course. :-) Computer engineers and computer scientists have a notorious reputation for worshipping the machines that we create in our own image. I sincerely hope that the advocates for forking Squeak, Stable Squeak, the SqF, et al, keep this firmly in mind. Remember, there are real people out there. Yes, the ones with money who may, or probably will not, buy our latest mindstorms. Cheers, Roger.....

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how to gracefully terminate a headless Comanche swiki?
by txporter＠mindspring.com 27 Apr '01

27 Apr '01

I am experimenting with Comanche on my Linux box, using the newest Linux vm (3.0pre2). After I set it up pointing to the correct port, I saved and exited, then started it using the -headless option. This is running great, but I was wondering if there is a way to gracefully shut it down, rather than killing the swiki process? Perhaps a function available through the admin pages to shut the swiki down? If not, will it hurt anything to kill the swiki process? My first impression is it should not since it seems that changes to the swiki are written out to the swiki directory structure as they occur. Thanks to all for such an interesting tool. I'm really impressed with it. Tom P.

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Re: looking for answers to exercises in Squeak book Ch 2.
by Tim Olson 27 Apr '01

27 Apr '01

>Thomas Porter <txporter(a)mindspring.com> wrote: > I assume that my assignment of "aString := 'squeak'" merely created a >variable, > > If this is the case, then how do I ever assign a variable which > was initialized to a literal with a new value: > > aString := 'foo'. > aString := 'bar'. > > if the variable merely points to the literal? Richard's reply hopefully cleared up any confusion you might have here regarding variable assignments. If you want to use a literal to initialize a variable that you want to be mutable, you should use 'copy': aString := 'Squeak' copy. aString at: 4 put: $a. -- Tim Olson

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Re: The "old farts" conference in Bonn end of June
by Bert Freudenberg 27 Apr '01

27 Apr '01

On Wed, 25 Apr 2001, Karl Ramberg wrote: > Alan Kay wrote: > > http://www.sdm.de/dt/index_d.htm > > http://www.sdm.de/en/index_e.htm And this is the URL for the conference itself: http://www.sdm.de/conf2001/ > it also say's it's going to be live on the internet... > does that mean streaming video perhaps ? Hopefully. On the German pages it is mentioned that attendence is permitted by invitation only ... :-( -- Bert

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Re: Comments on Smalltalk block closure designs, part 1
by Tim Olson 27 Apr '01

27 Apr '01

Mark van Gulik wrote: >Someone in this thread (I think it was Ian Piumarta) mentioned that >basically there is no such thing as "locality of reference" between cache >lines. This is due to the fact that this kind of cache uses associative >lookup (typically with some kind of "wired-or" if MY associative memory >serves me). Cache associativity has some effect, here, but it's rare to see highly- or fully-associative caches (the ones I can think of are TLBs on MIPS processors, and the L1 caches on some ARM designs). Most caches these days have a small amount of associativity, from 1-way "direct mapped" to 4-way or 8-way. The future trend is towards on-chip cache hierarchies with small, direct-mapped caches at the top and large, 4 to 8-way caches at the bottom. All small-associativity caches have problematic access patterns which cause conflict misses that can lead to greatly reduced performance, even when the working set being accessed is smaller than the total cache size. An interesting idea would be to collect "hot spot" access statistics while running, for use by the garbage collector to dynamically remap heavily-used areas to different cache sets to avoid thrashing. >He then stated that until a memory boundary was reached, the >cache miss cost stayed pretty low, then suddenly spiked way up. That's the transition from conflict misses, where the working set is small enough to fit in the cache, to capacity misses, where the short-term working set exceeds the cache's total capacity. >If a CPU >running in User Mode is allowed to test the current permissions of a page >(without triggering a page fault), a garbage collector could simply do its >best to mark what's currently in memory while building up a list of what to >fetch later from disk. >If the rate of >increase of processor speeds continues to be significantly higher than the >rate of increase of memory speed, this idea might soon become applicable at >the cache/main-memory boundary too. It already is: consider the 2GHz processors that will be available in the not-too-distant future. An L1 data cache access will take 1 to 2 cycles (0.5ns to 1ns), an on-chip L2 access will take around 20 cycles (10ns), but main memory access to a non-open DRAM page will still be at least 60ns. Future processor designs are attempting to address this in a way similar to what you propose, by incoporating the DRAM controller directly on chip, and coordinating it with the cache, reordering the cache <-> memory traffic. -- Tim Olson

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Re: Newsweek article on "Dynabook-like" computer
by Henrik Gedenryd 27 Apr '01

27 Apr '01

Karl Ramberg wrote: > A rumor site posted a image of what's maybe the new iBook from Apple. Karl Karl Karl, You must be a Mac rumor virgin :-) Perhaps it would pass as another upcoming Wintel ripoff. A talented Japanese guy has www.applele.com, and none of those who pretend theirs are real come even close. Actually, I just checked that the site is still there, and the new specimen on the front page looks pretty cool. Henrik

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