Saturday, March 8, 2008

More Mac OS 10.5 Irritations

Dear Apple;

Today my wife and I were unable to access the Internet because our ISP was having DNS issues. No problem - we set up local DNS servers on our MacBooks. After doing so it was apparent that running DNS locally significantly sped things up. We decided to make our changes permanent: I run Mac OS 10.4 (Tiger) and simply added a line to /etc/rc - like on any other BSD based system. However my wife isn't so fortunate she installed Leopard.

Mac OS 10.5 (Leopard) went a different route and removed /etc/rc in favor of launchd. Apple, why would you do this? No only does removing this file make "upgrading" to Leopard harder for individuals who rely on /etc/rc but it is also completely unnecessary. BSD has used rc scripts to boot for well over 20 years, by 2008 this is certainly mature code. It would have been just as easy to leave an empty (yet functional) rc script present with a comment that says: "# Included for legacy support - please use launchd. Thanks, Apple".

Thanks but no thanks to Leopard, Apple. If I wanted change for the sake of change and by doing so breaking important things that already work, I would vote for Obama and upgrade to Visa.

Sincerely,

Matthew W. Yucha



# # #
Insight: Barack Obama has a lot in common with Windows Vista!

Friday, March 7, 2008

Insights Today On Morality

  1. Non-contradictory values lead to the fulfillment of other values and are moral qua life.
  2. Contradictory values are a mixture of morality and immorality, happiness and sadness, life and death.
  3. There exist degrees of immorality: cigar smoking < drug addiction < suicide.
  4. Good is more powerful than evil as long as living things want to live.

Tuesday, March 4, 2008

Understanding Units

In studying objectivism, I am having difficulty understanding the concept of units. I have reposted a similar message to a small number of objectivist soures to find the correct answers. If / when I receive a reply I shall update this post so that all may benefit.

# # #

Assertions:

A unit is a (partial?) capture of the identity of an existent in man’s consciousness. Units must refer to a perceived concrete. Units can refer to existents other than physical concretes such as length. The relationship between a unit and attributes is composition: units are composed of attributes in various measurable quantities. The relationship between antecedent units and a concept is aggregation.

Questions:

  • Does a unit always refer to an instance of a concrete or can it be a generalization too? For example: a book vs. a particular book, Color vs. a particular shade of blue, weight vs. 100 pounds (or is 100 an attribute of a unit “collection of pounds”).
  • Does measurement omission apply to units and concepts?
  • Is a unit a concept as well?

3/5/2008 UPDATE:
I have received good feedback to the Objectivism Online Forum. Please read through if you have similar questions regarding units.