We humans think that we’re the be-all and end-all of evolution… that our bodies are mere support systems for our brains. Maybe we’re right, but some fascinating recent experiments suggest that we’ve survived despite our intelligence, not necessarily because of it.
(Pardon the excessive alliteration in the title, I got a little carried away. 🙂 ) Last night, I got a message from my instant-messaging program, indicating that it had been logged out of one of my IM accounts because I’d “logged in from another location.” I’m pretty sure that it was an error in the …
Continue reading ‘In Pursuit of Powerful, Puzzling, and Private Passwords’ »
More information on NASA’s temperature data, and why it points to a major global warming trend despite the Earth actually being in a twenty-year-long “cooling period.”
I’ve debated whether this article really warrants a mention on Geek Drivel, but I’ve decided to post it anyway, primarily for the first paragraph: Politicians in Western countries talk a lot about the contribution technology can make to politics, but they’re generally on about quite limited ideas like video debates. In Russia, some activists are …
Continue reading ‘“Unmanned Aerial Manhood outrage at Kasparov rally”’ »
This article clarifies a few things that I’ve subconsciously noticed myself — for instance, when you have a function in your program that does more than it should, it becomes hard to succinctly and concisely name it. It also introduces the “three numbers in software” (zero, one, and infinity), and the phrase “inheriting from the …
Continue reading ‘“When code goes bad: What to watch for”’ »
And again, life imitates art — in this case, the horse-racing game in the men’s bathroom in one of the Austin Powers movies, which was controlled by the “flow” of those standing at the urinals below it. Gotta love technology… and admire the business sense of the two guys who created it.
The people at Mozilla have come up with a neat idea for Firefox 3: they’re trying to set a Guinness World Record for the most-downloaded program in a twenty-four hour period, on an as-yet-undecided day next month. To see a breakdown (by country) of how many people have pledged to do, or to pledge to …
Continue reading ‘Firefox’s Download Day 2008: Help Set a Guinness World Record!’ »
Scott Adams writes this with his tongue firmly in his cheek, but you have to stop and wonder… maybe it could actually work.
(For the unenlightened out there, IDE stands for Integrated Development Environment, a program that usually includes a text editor specifically geared toward program source code, an integrated project manager to keep track of what files are part of your program, some kind of parser for error messages from your compiler, easy ways to call up …
Extremely snarky, but oh-so-accurate. I couldn’t have picked a better group of software to piss people off with, or described it more eloquently.