Soapbox

The US is currently in a frenzy over the TV series Mad Men. People seem to be discovering that Americans once were articulate and knew how not dress as slobs, when snappy dressers like Barack Obama or former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown (below) were the rule rather than the exception.

As I watched the French period action movie Le Bossu, I could not help but admiring the elaborate 18th Century Régence costumes.

In most animal species the male is the most flamboyant of the sexes, from the peacock to birds and beyond. If you look at Mughal miniatures, you will find their Emperors (like Shah Jahan below) were clad in finery and jewels far outstripping the women in their court.

The rich silks and brocades European aristocracy wore well into the 19th century did not fear from comparison with the ladies. Yet somehow since then men’s wear has devolved to subdued dark colors once worn only by priests, undertakers and school teachers (Péguy’s Black hussars of the Republic).

When I got my first Intel MacBook Pro, I purchased a license of Parallels Desktop, which was then pretty much the only game in town for PC virtualization on Mac OS X. At some point, when I got my Mac Pro, I switched to VMware Fusion because of the initial bugginess of the Parallels 4.0 initial release, and the competitive upgrade was almost free. When I upgraded to Snow Leopard, I switched back to Parallels because Fusion doesn’t work when you boot Snow Leopard in a 64-bit kernel, which I have now made the default on my Mac Pro (Fusion 3.0 was just announced, with 64-bit kernel support).

Pretty much the only apps I run in Parallels are:

• Microsoft Money 2001 (I need to write a webapp to replace this)
• IE8 (for testing purposes only, of course)
• EAC (sometimes gets better secure rips than Max)

When I installed Parallels 4.0, I was shocked by how much integration between the Windows VM and OS X is enabled by default. I don’t trust Windows one whit, and the last thing I want is for a Windows VM to become a vector for Windows malware to infect my Mac. I disabled all the integration features, and only access Windows files via file sharing where OS X gets to read and write Windows files, but the Windows VM stays securely sandboxed in its ghetto. Hideous Windows icons in the dock are also a distraction.

Parallels and VMware have been focusing on adding integration features to their virtualization products. They probably believe there are few performance optimizations left to be achieved, but if they continue with reckless disregard for security and the contamination of the OS X user experience with Windows ugliness, I will have to switch to VirtualBox, as its spareness looks increasingly like a virtue.

I am more than a little ashamed of my government’s defense of the pedophile rapist Roman Polanski. Unfortunately, it follows a pattern of making excuses for criminal behavior by people with literary or artistic talent, such as Villon, Lacenaire, Céline, or Althusser.

The Economist has an excellent article on how Indian mobile phone companies cut costs. They have an ARPU of $6.50 a month yet operate with a 40% gross margin. If US cellcos were run as efficiently, they would have a 1200% gross margin on the $51 monthly ARPU!

The time has long come to stop coddling grossly inefficient and anti-competitive cellular carriers in the West. They are no longer fledgling businesses in the shadow of landlines, quite the opposite, in fact. One good place to start would be to require them to offer consumers the choice of carrier for international calls and for roaming, as is the case with landlines. Their rates are simply extortionate.

I have an eight-core Nehalem Mac Pro. Most of these cores sit idle most of the time due to poorly written software that is not optimized for the post-Moore multicore world.

I am beginning to wonder if Intel’s transistor budget wouldn’t be better allocated to more SRAM cache instead of more cores. One SRAM bit uses up 4 transistors, the Xeon 5500 have 751 million transistors, of which 8Mx8x4 or 256 million are for the 8MB L3 cache. If the chip were brought down from quad-core to dual-core, that would allow doubling the cache. Many programs could run entirely from cache, including interpreters.