It’s the world’s most advanced operating system? I mean really, that’s an overstatement. Hello! that’s nothing more than a brag as there’s nothing to back up the statement. Advanced for what? File systems? zfs! observability? dtrace! pretties on the screen? XGL! The ability to perform more than one name service lookup at a time? [ok, that’s a cheap shot, I’m sure they fixed this]
Pants, complete pants I tell you!
I’m sorry, I just prefer a mouse with more than one button
It reeks of some form of elitism, and lets be honest using X for so long made a three button mouse mandatory, what with the middle button paste thing, which I love and try to recreate on the PC when using cygwin/X applications. Every time I look at a mac, I get this chill just thinking about the higher price tag along with the crippled bar of a mouse button. It’s effing stupid. We still have double click for the primary select, and if you want a context menu you need to use one of the extended keys (honestly, I can’t remember which) to get it to pop up. It’s a really fricking broken model when you have only one button.
Send in the pie menus, my friends, send in the pie menus.
South park
Last week’s South Park episode with Richard Dawkins was funny. No sacred cows left untipped with these guys.
monist or dualist?
I’ve been reading ‘The God Delusion‘, by Signor Dawkins. Prior to reading this book, I’ve only read articles and summaries of his work. This is much more of a full digestion of his work.
To be honest, and this is based on some terrible reading in my youth, I’m a monist, with slightly dualistic tendencies based on being able to use some mechanical system to replace/reproduce someone’s mind. Let’s be honest about this; I think it’s only a matter of time before we create a mechanical system that can replicate actual people. The why question is, of course, is this the same person?
If you recreate the exact mind of another person how can anyone determine after the fact that one is different from the other; in fact as a recreated being how do you know that one is more than the other. Consider if you replaced someone’s brain one neuron after another is there any difference?
Honestly, this isn’t a god question, it’s not about god, it’s more of the nature of existence. Whee, I can back myself up, what does this mean for my mind in the future?
Pants, I’ve just put into words something that has been sitting on my mind for a long time.
Sorry kids, I don’t believe in a god.
I don’t drive much over the weekend
Granted it’s a bank holiday weekend here in sunny old Ireland, so the Gardaí are out in force trying to catch speeders and make sure people aren’t driving while drunk. I’ve been stopped before, and it was at most a check of the tax and insurance on the car but this time it was breathing into the breath-alcohol meter. First time I’ve ever done it, and as they bag everyone on the road, I wasn’t concerned that they thought I was driving erratically or anything like that. I would have been stunned if it had given any result other than zero, but even so I was a tad nervous. There is a feeling that you are under a spotlight (it was a big chunky torch).
Noew I’m back at the house and enjoying a relaxing drink before heading for bed as after all, I need something to get the smallest twinges of adrenalin out of my system.
space for beer
A professor stood before his philosophy class and had some items in
front of him. When the class began, wordlessly, he picked up a very
large and empty mayonnaise jar and proceeded to fill it with golf
balls.
He then asked the students if the jar was full. They agreed that it
was.
So the professor then picked up a box of pebbles and poured them into
the jar. He shook the jar lightly. The pebbles rolled into the open
areas between golf balls.
He then asked the students again if the jar was full. They agreed it
was.
The professor next picked up a box of sand and poured it into the jar.
Of course, the sand filled up everything else.
He asked once more if the jar was full. The students responded with a
unanimous “yes.”
The professor then produced two cans of beer from under the table and
poured the entire contents into the jar, effectively filling the empty
space between the sand. The students laughed.
“Now,” said the professor, as the laughter subsided, “I want you to
recognize that this jar represents your life. The golf balls are the
important things–your family, your children, your health, your
friends, your favorite passions–things that if everything else was
lost and only they remained, your life would still be full.
“The pebbles are the other things that matter like your job, your
house, your car.
The sand is everything else–the small stuff.
“If you put the sand into the jar first,” he continued, “there is no
room for the pebbles or the golf balls. The same goes for life. If
you spend all your time and energy on the small stuff, you will never
have room for the things that are important to you. Pay attention to
the things that are critical to your happiness. Play with your
children. Take time to get medical checkups. Take your partner out
to dinner. Play another 18. There will always be time to clean the
house, and fix the disposal.
“Take care of the golf balls first, the things that really matter.
Set your priorities. The rest is just sand.”
One of the students raised her hand and inquired what the beer
represented.
The professor smiled. “I’m glad you asked. It just goes to show you
that no matter how full your life may seem, there’s always room for a
couple of beers.”
bulls don’t have udders
I saw a trailer for some stupid animated farm movie. A male cow is a bull. Bulls do not have udders. All the cattle on the trailer – both male and female alike had udders. Could this be the first transexual animal movie for kids?
So I decided to play with c++ builder
Probably one of the handiest features of C++ is the ability to create an object on the stack, and have it destroyed once the class has gone out of scope. This is because of the design of the language.
When you create an object using the syntax ‘ObjectT foo’ the object is instantly initialized, and you refer to each of the items in the object as foo.<whatever>. When the function returns the ObjectT’s destructor is called to clean up the object. This happens for every class.
Borland have seen it fit to make their compiler barf when you use one of the Visual Class Library(VCL) classes to create an object. Personally, I find the fact that you have to then wrap the code in a __try__ __finally__ block to be a waste of my time. After all there is no rational reason for preventing me from using the variable on the stack, as stack memory is just as good as heap memory (I’m old skool me!).
All you’re going to have on the stack is a pointer to a VTBL and the data concerned with the object; nothing more. If you have to cast it to a lesser object, then cast it to a lesser object. If you are using this object in another object (for example adding it to a collection), then use the proper syntax (in this case the ObjectT *foo = new ObjectT()). As a programmer you should know these things.
I would argue that the compiler should not protect us from such annoyances, but the reality is that to make better code we need more assertive nannies. All my C code is compiled with -Wall -Werror, which catches a lot of stupid mistakes, but doesn’t catch a lot of normal problems. Sometimes I think I would be better in a garbage collected, reference managed, array overrun protected world… but where would be the fun in that? I like my assembly language, I’m more careful as I know every instruction counts. That and the fact that a review of assembly code takes significantly longer than the same review of C code makes me pray that the developers are paying more attention.
I am kimiko?
Another one of those surreal quizzes. This one gave me an unusual result…
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Which Megatokyo Character Are You?
created with QuizFarm.com
Commander, my commander
It’s an interesting one. I seem to be less capable of commanding troops in Company of Heroes than other games. The problem stems, I think from the feeling I have that the troops in CofH are real people, I empathize with them when I see them being cut to ribbons by machine guns. I hate it when my snipers get shot, and I get angry when a tank runs my men over.
Then we have Warhammer 40k, Dawn of War. I have no compunctions to sending wave after wave of troops at the opposition, slowly eroding their numbers until I can actually wipe them out. Entire squads get wiped out and I just send more in. I just don’t have the same connection to them.
Strange that, and it’s only a computer game.