AKMA’s Random Thoughts

Need some graffiti in your MUD? Hire this guy... He has a clue. Or two.

God help you with the audience with Jacques. In his own often obscure and sometimes erroneous but usually pontificating words:

"Monsters cannot be announced.
One cannot say: 'here are our monsters',
without immediately turning the monsters into pets."

Seems kinda like a Brando wannabe. I could be wrong, but then... his name seems to lead into derision... hunh?

The "this guy of whom I spoke above was an attempt to add a hyperlink to Jaron lanier's home page... the link was well formed, so I dunno what happened... anyway, heeerre's Jaron!

http://people.advanced.org/~jaron/

Sorry, Frank; the MT configuration had HTML disabled. I fixed that now—thanks for the link to Lanier (made clickable here).

As you probably guess, where you express derision for JD, I harbor a deep respect. While he is subject to error (as are we all), I haven’t known him to pontificate. He does dwell with massively complicated and counterintuitive notions, respectfully and rigorously; but you probably have in mind some portion of his work of which I’m not thinking just now. (After all, Christopher Norris defends Derrida in contradistinction to the naughty “postmodernists,” whom he decries—thanks to wood s lot for the link.)

I’m not sure what’s bothering you about the “monsters” quotation; it seems pretty straightforward and convincing to me.

I studied Derrida back in the day when he was new on the academic scene. He came to talk at my school, and like many other curious fans, I went along. I did not make the "Colombo" comparison... I found him remarkably approachable, charming, and (if I may say) quite good-looking.

From his work, I was expecting someone more formidable. Which he was, if pronounced Frenchly, "Formidable!"

Have fun. I recall he had a rather nice self-deprecating sense of humor (not so common among French intellectuals, or indeed MOST intellectuals).

derrida intrigues a new generation for, among other things, his abrahamic and nearly prophetic cadence. there is an odd ancient way about his "massively complicated and counterintuitive notions" (i like your phrase).

dare i ask the great AKMA of the setting for this spending of time with jack?

If I see “the great AKMA,” I’ll pass along your message. . . .

He (and I) will be at the annual Society of Biblical Literature Meeting in Toronto; I’ll be in some of the same sessions as he, and I’ve been invited to a reception for him.

But variables get one benefit people do not

That gives us a pretty good starting point to understand a lot more about variables, and that's what we'll be examining next lesson. Those new variable types I promised last lesson will finally make an appearance, and we'll examine a few concepts that we'll use to organize our data into more meaningful structures, a sort of precursor to the objects that Cocoa works with. And we'll delve a little bit more into the fun things we can do by looking at those ever-present bits in a few new ways.

That gives us a pretty good starting point to understand a lot more about variables, and that's what we'll be examining next lesson. Those new variable types I promised last lesson will finally make an appearance, and we'll examine a few concepts that we'll use to organize our data into more meaningful structures, a sort of precursor to the objects that Cocoa works with. And we'll delve a little bit more into the fun things we can do by looking at those ever-present bits in a few new ways.

Being able to understand that basic idea opens up a vast amount of power that can be used and abused, and we're going to look at a few of the better ways to deal with it in this article.

Our next line looks familiar, except it starts with an asterisk. Again, we're using the star operator, and noting that this variable we're working with is a pointer. If we didn't, the computer would try to put the results of the right hand side of this statement (which evaluates to 6) into the pointer, overriding the value we need in the pointer, which is an address. This way, the computer knows to put the data not in the pointer, but into the place the pointer points to, which is in the Heap. So after this line, our int is living happily in the Heap, storing a value of 6, and our pointer tells us where that data is living.

This is another function provided for dealing with the heap. After you've created some space in the Heap, it's yours until you let go of it. When your program is done using it, you have to explicitly tell the computer that you don't need it anymore or the computer will save it for your future use (or until your program quits, when it knows you won't be needing the memory anymore). The call to simply tells the computer that you had this space, but you're done and the memory can be freed for use by something else later on.