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You mean like this or this?

You mean like this or this?

Me too. I used to buy singles fairly regularly JUST FOR the b-sides. In many cases I already owned the album and wanted some of the stuff that they hadn't thought should go on the album. Bands like the Wildhearts would regularly put record brand new songs for the B sides. Then bad things happened... the BPI introduced rules limiting what could be released as a single to be eligible for the chart. Naturally this means B-Sides get thrown to the wayside and a crappy remix gets thtown in to make up the space (should point out that this isn't true with the Wildhearts - Ginger started a singles club last year with the aim of puting out 4 new songs every month. If you haven't heard them do your selve a favour and get them collected)

I like music a lot and its where the guts of whatever spare cash I have get spent. I buy 2 - 3 albums a month, but rarely buy anything through iTunes, Napster and the like (eMusic and Magnatune are a rare exception). Why? I like CDs. I like holding the disc and seeing the pretty label, opening up the case and reading the booklet. I like being able to listen to it on the stereo, in the car or horror of horrors, ripping it and sticking it on my iRiver. Having it on CD originally makes a pretty good back up.

Technology isn't killing albums, they are alive and well. I still haven't grasped the logic of spending $9.99 on an album, downloading it and for my money only having a pile of scream electrons, just waiting to disapper at the next HD crash (how many people really back up all their downloaded legal mp3s?).

As long as I can get music on shiny discs I will!!

Apparently Gates is convinced that Microsoft can fix bugs much faster than Linux, simply because they have more poeple on staff.

Perhaps he should take another glance at Brooks' The Mythical Man Month.

You could have a wishlist over at the friendly one-click creating Amazon?

I've had one for a few years to support some of my work.

Occaisionally I receive something and it's a nice bonus to actually getting something done.

Of course it doesn't work out so well when your code gets added to Linux distributions and nobody gets it from your website directly anymore - that was the thing that I noticed which made the initial donations tail off.

Still I do earn a little bit every now and again doing remote support / remote sysadmin work always getting paid by DVDs etc. It's much easier to handle than having to worry about currency conversion etc.

It's also a good way of having a small payment in advance, or at particular milestones - something like "Six films from the list, one in advance then one a week until the job is complete".

Here is the link. Unfortunately the UK price for the basic version is £180 or about $340. :-(

> It's inexplicable.

Oh no, not enotirely. Incidents of mass-delusion are quite common: See here [Amazon.co.uk].

How flash can build your business: USians won't remember, but there was a dot.com company in the UK called Boo.com.
Flash, java applets and all on their website. Looked brilliant to the advertising people, as they browsed the site via a fibre-optic link from the the server in the basement. For would-be customers on dialup, it was another matter.
I heard about this company twice: once in a web magazine saying how shite all the fancy flash was, making the site nearly unusable (and nearly unloadable on dialup). The second time I heard about it was when they went bust.
Coincidence? I think not.

The story

In the hopes of catching SciFi fans, could I recommend the fiction of Jeff Noon, especially 'Vurt' and 'Pollen', partly predicated on exactly this sort of development and its social consequences.

In the hopes of catching SciFi fans, could I recommend the fiction of Jeff Noon, especially 'Vurt' and 'Pollen', partly predicated on exactly this sort of development and its social consequences.

Benny, Benny, Benny. "Intel held it's UK Sonoma Launch Party" - no need for an apostrophe here. Get a copy of Eats, Shoots & Leaves and get yourself back on the right track!

Drucker. Go read, think and then think again. Then go read about the Stevenson family (hint: click here) Oh - and by the way, the geeky stuff will soon be what you do after hours. Hacking people is much more fun, and the best challenge you'll ever get.

You can get a non-contract mobile for 19.99 (that's 35$ approx)

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B0002K780 8/

I think the GP was referring to that Sony does not make any multi-region DVD players...

Amazon disagrees with you

Actually the DVD region encoding war has already been lost by Sony. Nobody in Europe (I'm in Ireland) buys DVD players anymore unless they are multi-region.

Nearly all the DVD players sold in all stores and on the web in Europe are multi-region now, including from the big manufacturers like Philips, Toshiba, Pioneer and even Sony.

Take a look on the UK Amazon site, the second most popular item in the electronics section is a Sony multi-region DVD player! (Number 1 is also a multi-region DVD player):
Amazon UK Electronics top 100 list

Games may be better at teaching certain things than books, but they can never provide the kind of mind expansion that reading a lot of novels can.

For the mind expansion may I recommend special kinds of mushrooms. Then the only books you'll have to read are written by Aldous Huxley.

Plus we need to have conversions of things like Pride and Prejudice to make it appeal to more women. Though my girlfriend is really into the Sims to I'm sure they could just come up with a Jane AUsten expansion pack.

Games may be better at teaching certain things than books, but they can never provide the kind of mind expansion that reading a lot of novels can.

For the mind expansion may I recommend special kinds of mushrooms. Then the only books you'll have to read are written by Aldous Huxley.

Plus we need to have conversions of things like Pride and Prejudice to make it appeal to more women. Though my girlfriend is really into the Sims to I'm sure they could just come up with a Jane AUsten expansion pack.

• The Bond and Money Markets: strategy, trading, analysis by Moorad Choudhry
• Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis
• When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein
• FIASCO by Frank Partnoy
• Bombardiers by Po Bronson (fiction, but absolutely hilarious and well worth a read)

Obviously, these are all about the fixed income markets, as opposed to equities.

Anyway, having said all that, you can read all the books you want, but the best way of learning the business is to sit on a trading floor, next to the traders.

Jack

• The Bond and Money Markets: strategy, trading, analysis by Moorad Choudhry
• Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis
• When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein
• FIASCO by Frank Partnoy
• Bombardiers by Po Bronson (fiction, but absolutely hilarious and well worth a read)

Obviously, these are all about the fixed income markets, as opposed to equities.

Anyway, having said all that, you can read all the books you want, but the best way of learning the business is to sit on a trading floor, next to the traders.

Jack

• The Bond and Money Markets: strategy, trading, analysis by Moorad Choudhry
• Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis
• When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein
• FIASCO by Frank Partnoy
• Bombardiers by Po Bronson (fiction, but absolutely hilarious and well worth a read)

Obviously, these are all about the fixed income markets, as opposed to equities.

Anyway, having said all that, you can read all the books you want, but the best way of learning the business is to sit on a trading floor, next to the traders.

Jack

• The Bond and Money Markets: strategy, trading, analysis by Moorad Choudhry
• Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis
• When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein
• FIASCO by Frank Partnoy
• Bombardiers by Po Bronson (fiction, but absolutely hilarious and well worth a read)

Obviously, these are all about the fixed income markets, as opposed to equities.

Anyway, having said all that, you can read all the books you want, but the best way of learning the business is to sit on a trading floor, next to the traders.

Jack

• The Bond and Money Markets: strategy, trading, analysis by Moorad Choudhry
• Liar's Poker by Michael Lewis
• When Genius Failed by Roger Lowenstein
• FIASCO by Frank Partnoy
• Bombardiers by Po Bronson (fiction, but absolutely hilarious and well worth a read)

Obviously, these are all about the fixed income markets, as opposed to equities.

Anyway, having said all that, you can read all the books you want, but the best way of learning the business is to sit on a trading floor, next to the traders.

Jack

Can we please stop linking to that FAQ about Trusted Computing? Talk about spreading FUD all over the place.

After having done a paper on TC I would really recommend that people read the specs (a bit dry), or the book?

Read "The Diamond Age" as well and see if TC can fit into the idea from there of anonymous, secure communications. You're not going to reach level 20 of Cryptnet without something like it.

If you've got the time then have a look at it from another perspective and wash a bit of the FUD off.

Snopes debunks this story But that's not going to stop me using it to recommend one of my favourite books: A Fish Caught in Time: The Hunt for the Coelacanth, by Samantha Weinberger. I couldn't put it down and I had to blink back a tear at one point. Not bad for a factual book.

> I'm dubious about any claims to some mysterious program
> which compresses anything amazingly well without strong evidence.

It's hardly mysterious. You can download trial versions and try it yourself - it's a well known compression technique that there are whole books about

There is near infinite evidence that it works so I don't know why you're doubting it. The issue isn't whether or not it works, it's why hasn't somebody made an opensource algorithm that we can all use.

The problem is that the existing fractal formats are all patented by companies that probably charge a fortune to license it.

"Just once, I'd like to see a "Completely Impractical guide to something"

A Practical Guide to Securing Windows NT Servers and Workstations

Why people think such crap rates is beyond me, those flicks have scripts designed for kids... ...or adults with a mental age of 12. The list doesn't include popular chick flicks so why it includes popular kiddies flicks is beyond me.

Then there's SPR, critics & monday morning halfbacks love it for it's 'realism', but anyone in the know knows it's anything but - it has the surrendering German with a skinhead haircut to make him unsympathetic (a old Hollywood trick) when German soldiers in WWII rarely had their skulls sheared - if anything they had short back 'n sides with long stylised front hair (I had a old family friend who was in the British army, although he was a Vienese Jew, & he took heaps of photos during the war, & of all the surrendering German soldiers, circa 44 & 45, the most common hair style was a long wave of hair at the front & top brushed to the side so it hung over the shorn stuble arround the ears & behind). Also Mustangs were not used by the Americans for tank busting duties on the Western front (although they were used like that on the Med), in reality it would've been a Thunderbolt or even more likely a RAF Typhoon (the primary tank buster at Normandy), but we all know Speilburg couldn't have a British plane saving the day, or a American one that's grossly fat & ugly.

& how such a list could have nothing by Akira Kurosawa, Krzysztof Kieslowski or fail to include one or both of Sergio Leones' Once Apon a Time masterpieces is beyond me. The relatively recent Paramount DVD Special Collectors Edition release of Once Apon a Time in the West has to be one of the truely great collectors DVDs of all time. It also failed to list the Citizen Kane Special Edition DVD, one of the great all time collectors DVDs for cinema lovers. Another great true cinema DVD collectable they failed to list was Martin Scorsese's tribute to Italian cinema DVD, a 4 hour tribute to the greatest of Rossellini, De Sica, Fellini, Visconti & Antonioni, etc. The DVD was recently reviewed by the SBS Movie Show. Other truely great DVDs include Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue Box Set & Kieslowski's 3 Colours Trilogy.

Another truely great 'must have' is the History of Cinema 12 DVD box set, which includes such gems as Buster Keaton's The General, Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin & Fritz Lang's Metropolis amongst Lon Chaney's & DW Griffith's greats. Of course one mustn't fail to include the Complete Ealing Studio Comedies Box Set which includes such classic Ealing comedies as The Lavender Hill Mob, Kind Hearts & Coronets (in which Alec Guinness plays 8 parts) & The Lady Killers.

Really Ugo's top 50 DVD List reminds me of all those people who have never travelled abroad yet go arround proclaiming that their country is the best country in the world to live, because it seems to be put together by someone who experiance of cinema seems to be limited to the summer blockbusters & alsorans of the last decade or so, & that's about it.

Why people think such crap rates is beyond me, those flicks have scripts designed for kids... ...or adults with a mental age of 12. The list doesn't include popular chick flicks so why it includes popular kiddies flicks is beyond me.

Then there's SPR, critics & monday morning halfbacks love it for it's 'realism', but anyone in the know knows it's anything but - it has the surrendering German with a skinhead haircut to make him unsympathetic (a old Hollywood trick) when German soldiers in WWII rarely had their skulls sheared - if anything they had short back 'n sides with long stylised front hair (I had a old family friend who was in the British army, although he was a Vienese Jew, & he took heaps of photos during the war, & of all the surrendering German soldiers, circa 44 & 45, the most common hair style was a long wave of hair at the front & top brushed to the side so it hung over the shorn stuble arround the ears & behind). Also Mustangs were not used by the Americans for tank busting duties on the Western front (although they were used like that on the Med), in reality it would've been a Thunderbolt or even more likely a RAF Typhoon (the primary tank buster at Normandy), but we all know Speilburg couldn't have a British plane saving the day, or a American one that's grossly fat & ugly.

& how such a list could have nothing by Akira Kurosawa, Krzysztof Kieslowski or fail to include one or both of Sergio Leones' Once Apon a Time masterpieces is beyond me. The relatively recent Paramount DVD Special Collectors Edition release of Once Apon a Time in the West has to be one of the truely great collectors DVDs of all time. It also failed to list the Citizen Kane Special Edition DVD, one of the great all time collectors DVDs for cinema lovers. Another great true cinema DVD collectable they failed to list was Martin Scorsese's tribute to Italian cinema DVD, a 4 hour tribute to the greatest of Rossellini, De Sica, Fellini, Visconti & Antonioni, etc. The DVD was recently reviewed by the SBS Movie Show. Other truely great DVDs include Krzysztof Kieslowski's Decalogue Box Set & Kieslowski's 3 Colours Trilogy.

Another truely great 'must have' is the History of Cinema 12 DVD box set, which includes such gems as Buster Keaton's The General, Eisenstein's Battleship Potemkin & Fritz Lang's Metropolis amongst Lon Chaney's & DW Griffith's greats. Of course one mustn't fail to include the Complete Ealing Studio Comedies Box Set which includes such classic Ealing comedies as The Lavender Hill Mob, Kind Hearts & Coronets (in which Alec Guinness plays 8 parts) & The Lady Killers.

Really Ugo's top 50 DVD List reminds me of all those people who have never travelled abroad yet go arround proclaiming that their country is the best country in the world to live, because it seems to be put together by someone who experiance of cinema seems to be limited to the summer blockbusters & alsorans of the last decade or so, & that's about it.

Remember kids - technically corporations are psychopaths.

nb: I could be wrong!

So I'm not sure it counts as a "profound text", and it's not an economic bible but it is good.

All the proofs you ever need are here.

Seriously though, some Calculus results aren't that difficult (although others are, but we can ignore them, ey?). For example, the rule that says "If you have two functions of x added together, then you can differentiate them separately and add them together"
(That is if f(x) = g(x) + h(x) then f`(x) = g`(x) + h`(x) ):

Let u and v be functions of x, and y be their sum:
y = u + v

If you increase x by an amount, call it Dx (normally written "Delta-X", but I don't want to cause display problems, so I'm just using a capital D), then u and v and y will also increase by some amount (since they are all functions of x):
u = u + Du
v = v + Dv
y = y + Dy

So:

y + Dy = u + Du + v + Dv

and subtracting the original y=u+v from this, leaves:

Dy = Du + Dv

Dividing by Dx, leaves you:

Dy / Dx = Du / Dx + Dv / Dx

This is pretty much it (You can take it through to the end, too, using limits, but it all gets a bit difficult to type here on Slashdot. And it's not like anyone is going to read this post, anyway)

I apologise if you actually do have a background in mathematics and this is patronising you. I apologise if you actually do not have a background in mathematics, since in that case you probably don't care!

As for Fermat's Last Theorem, read this book. I can't tell you how good it is though, since it is outside of my price range, and my local library doesn't have it (and refuses to believe it exists, on the grounds that I must mean that stupid Simon Singh book.)

Indeed. I've got a great book here that is assigned on many "new media for morons" courses. It's got a great little anecdote (reference at the end), plus some bullshit to justify it. Here's the first paragraph of bullshit:

The Screen Play researchers argue that the dominant discursive construction of young computer users as 'future workers' in the knowledge economy leaves little space for them to articulate their pleasure in using computers in non-authorised ways - primarily, though not exclusively, gameplaying. The following excahnge, in which parents discussing their agenda for encouraging computer use at home are interrupted by their 'earwigging' teenage son, captures something of the ways in which these broader discourses and policies (and their contradictions are struggled over in everyday family relationships:

Then here is the anecdote itself:

Dad: But we did get stuff for the kids to use on it. Mum: We got some educational software for the kids, at that point we were determined they weren't going to play games. [Laughter] I would like Steven to get involved in other things. I've tried a few times to interest him in various things and it's the games, definitely, that dominate his computer usage. Q: Right. And so that's a... Mum: Steven, what's the problem? Steven: I'm just saying that I'm going to bed now. And games rule! Visual Basic sucks!

Then the researchers have some more justification at the end:

Steven's outburst, like the immediate pleasures of computer gameplaying he refers to, disrupt the discourses of future rewards for 'educational' computer use.

(The whole thing is from Lister et al. (2003) "New Media: A Critical Introduction", London: Routledge, p. 244)

To which any sane person who has actually used a computer would respond: bull. "Edutainment" software is generally an enormous pile of patronising horseshit. Not that VB is 'edutainment', though it's about as functional and useful as edutainment.

The researchers who write about all this stuff (and I've read a number of tomes written by them) do talk so much crap, it's unbelievable.

There are a few people in various disciplines who do get the whole point about the Internet and computers in general. Larry Lessig gets it. David Weinberger gets it. Quite a lot of the academics who run blogs and post on USENET (etc.) get it. Most of the academic nerds who go to things like Etcon, Notcon etc. get it. But there are so many people in the humanities, notably media studies, who really don't understand that Marxist historical materialism or physicalist determinism really have no place in talking about computers.

That said, in comparison to what I've read, the paper linked by the grandparent post is not too bad. They are actually talking about the technology and the software.

This book -- The Backroom Boys: The Secret Return of the British Boffin -- has a great section on Concorde. It explains the whole thing.

Too late. Scimitar SL-2

DVD players made for PCs tend to be a little more protective and I don't know why.

True, I found this book interesting:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/072253325 X/qid=1103625586/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl/202-8548423 -4003805

I want The LaTeX Companion by Frank Mittelbach, Michel Goossens et al. LaTeX is a seriously cool piece of software for text publishing -- and far from easy to use, if you want to exploit its full potential (it's not difficult to produce simple but good looking documents, that's almost automagic). From what I've heard, this book is among the best on the subject. Too bad the title makes it sound like a condom.

So Santa, if you read this: Please, please, please!

I believe there was also a series of books by another author called Meg and Mog about a witch and her cat (I used to work in a bookshop).

Yes, there are... http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/search-handle- url/index=books-uk&field-author=Nicoll%2C%20Helen/ 202-3837128-4961456(I used to be a small child. :)

I don't think that the Windows 95/98 release works on Windows XP: at least that's what the first review here says. I hope that it runs on Windows 2000, because that's what I'm using, but I bet I'm hoping in vain.

It can't be all about the $$ because if they want me to splash out on one of these then they would have to open up their drivers. They don't seem to want to do that, I ditched 3d and stuck with 8MB ATI rage cards (even on desktops), which sucks because I want to buy Doom3.

The book is called Far Horizons
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/185723942 3/qid=1102823670/sr=1-13/ref=sr_1_0_13/026-7694002 -5674868

i got it in a budget bookstore in the UK for UKP1. unfortunately the cover says its not available in the US

good luck finding it, but its worth the read

to the ac in the brother post: you're tight, when i posted i hadn't read the whole thing. my bad

Suchetha

Writing adventure stories about dogs in this post-Columbine world.

War in 2006... reminds me of a book I read a few years back, where the author was predicting the third world war would break out in, guess what...? 2006!
Guess it was wrong of me to laugh at him, afterall.

Just for once, it looks like the UK is ahead of the US on this one. Amazon UK have what looks like the equivalent (albeit with a different name?) out on 10 December 2004, also the same day the extended edition of ROTK is out over here.

december 10

Both Amazon UK and Amazon US have it down for release December 10th, 2004 so it is indeed out in time for Christmas. You don't get the statues or the "bonus" DVDs that come with the second and third parts though.

It may well be that there is a spike in consumption during "westernization." I'd be interested in seeing any demographics on this. But perhaps, in the same way that technology can be adopted by groups that didn't originate it themself, perhaps western lifestyles can be adopted by neighbouring groups - including some of those cultural traits that lower birth rate. I think you may find that the empowerment of women is really the key to it.

Shame you found vegetarianism disatisfying. As with many other things, you need to go about it properly. It's no good just dropping something from your life and not filling the gap with anything. May I recommend this?

On the subject of vegetarianism and aggression:

My hypothesis is that vegetarians are not sufficiently aggressive personality types (focussing instead on nurturing and the elimination of suffering) to push back frontiers which often requires a person with a somewhat brutal "I don't care whose toes I step on" point of view.

Well, there was always Hitler. On the opposite end of the scale you could consider Ghandi whose methods may have been "peaceful" but he was a classic aggressive personality type - enjoyed confrontation and demolishing his opponents verbally very much. I myself have been vegetarian all my life and most people find me quite pushy. My experience, if anything, is that those who choose to be vegetarian are making a break with tradition and other people's values. It helps to be a pioneering "I don't care whose toes I step on" type person to do that. If anecdotal experience is valid at all, then I've actually found the vegetarians I know to be more able to stand up for themselves than anything else.

I can't help thinking of Ceasars lines in the play:
"Yon Cassius has a lean and hungry look, such men as he are dangerous. Let me have men about me who are fat."

It ain't the hamburger stuffing ones you have to worry about.

Someone should tell Amazon UK then.

There's a zone 1 "collector edition" that would suit you just fine.
One complete season on 5 DVDs, with and without laugh track.
I can find it here, you should be able ton find it in UK.
Hey, there's even a zone 2 version at amazon.
You didn't look very hard, did you?