Being an atheist means being atheistic, that is, not taking a theistic view point. This does not mean one doesn’t take a religious viewpoint — though I don’t take one — but that one doesn’t agree with the notion of an omnipotent, omnipresent being. In ordinary life, a disagreement with another viewpoint isn’t generally a cause for decrying the holders of the other viewpoint as stupid, more often it is an invitation for a reasoned debate on the subject (at least, amongst reasonable people).

In a very interesting twist to the continuing DRM soap opera, this week Apple and EMI announced that they will be offering EMI’s entire selection of songs on the iTunes music store in a both a higher quality and unencumbered by Apple’s FairPlay DRM (and at a higher price). This is a very important milestone in digital music. For the first time, major label music will be available to purchase digitally without DRM spoiling the experience.

I use the Document Map feature of Word all the time as we work on quite large documents at work. I have Word set up so the document map is always shown. A couple of days ago, however, I opened up the Thumbnail sidebar also present in Word. I quickly decided that, for my purposes, the thumbnail sidebar was useless and changed back to the document map instead. Incredibly annoyingly, now Word opened the thumbnail view every time I started Word, no matter how many times I changed to the document map.

A major change is occurring in how computers are increasing their performance. For many years, processor manufacturers have increased the performance of their wares by making them run faster. This approach is starting to reach the end of its usefulness, however, partly due to things like the speed electrons can be persuaded to travel and other hard to change physical properties of the world in which we live.

Alternative ways to speed up computing operations exist, and one of these seems to be the New Way which is being trodden. The chosen path involves having multiple processors which can execute different bits of code at the same time, thus enabling more work to be done in a given amount of time. This approach has been used in servers for years by having multiple physical processors, of course, but is now becoming more mainstream on desktop computers. This is due to manufacturers starting to build more than one logical processor onto a single physical processor chip. Each logical processor is called a core. Both Intel and AMD now have been producing multi-core processors for long enough they are now common in desktop computers.

When I write a post for dx13, I write it in plain text with a special markup syntax. Some hacked together regexes then translate my markup into bold text, links and the like. This solution was a duct tape and string solution, often meaning that I had to go out of my way to make sure the regexes could parse and format my writings correctly.

It is not unknown for me to miss a failure in the parsing and for bits of formatting markup to then end up in the published items. This is somewhat unsatisfactory.