The Varieties of Anti-Intellectualism

One of the recurring features of American intellectual life is hand-wringing over “anti-intellectualism” by, of course, intellectuals. One of my regular commenters has pointed out that the term and concept of anti-intellectualism are used to describe several distinct phenomena that are relatively easily confused. He’s right, and I think it could bring some clarity to… Continue reading The Varieties of Anti-Intellectualism

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Categorized as Politics

The Smartphone Wars: a bit of Christmas cheer

On Google+, Andy Rubin reports: “There were 3.7M Android activations on 12/24 and 12/25.” That’s a 170% spike over the 700K activations per-day Rubin announced on 20 Dec. I’ve previously observed that only about 1 in 10 of Android activations show up in the smartphone statistics for the U.S. so Android is probably looking at… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: a bit of Christmas cheer

A Christmas cat

The best Yule present my wife and I are getting this year is that our beloved cat Sugar is not dying.

Are threads still a menace?

An interesting question showed up in my mailbox today. So interesting that I think it’s worth a public answer and discussion: In chapter 7 of The Art of Unix Programming, you classified threads under the section “Problems and Methods to Avoid”. You also wrote that with the increased emphasis on thread-local storage, threads are looking… Continue reading Are threads still a menace?

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Categorized as Software

The Smartphone Wars: Andy Rubin brings the news

Over on Google+, Andy Rubin says: There are now over 700,000 Android devices activated every day…and for those wondering, we count each device only once (ie, we don’t count re-sold devices), and “activations” means you go into a store, buy a device, put it on the network by subscribing to a wireless service. This does… Continue reading The Smartphone Wars: Andy Rubin brings the news

SOPA and the oblivious

A government that is big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take everything away from you – including your Internet freedom. That’s the thought that keeps running through my head as I contemplate the full-scale panic going on right now about SOPA, the “Stop Internet Piracy Act”.

Coming soon: reposurgeon does Subversion

For those of you who have been following the development of reposurgeon, a pre-announcement: the next version, probably to be numbered 2.0, will directly read Subversion dumpfiles and repositories. I’ve got this feature working now – it’s why my blogging has been scant recently – but I intend to have a really good regression-test suite… Continue reading Coming soon: reposurgeon does Subversion

Bad at languages?

I had a very international childhood – lived in Venezuela and Rome and London, and visited lots of other places in Europe (Paris, Athens, Venice, Barcelona). The cause was my dad working for a multinational; the result was that I learned and forgot three languages before I was thirteen.

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Categorized as General