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Shame, that. The guy did some great albums.

Shame, that. The guy did some great albums.

You might be interested in this album, Farinelli: Original Soundtrack in which computers where used to simulate the sound of a castrati singer.

I hate working in the open. We have an open-plan office because internal walls (and indeed, dividers) are expensive. Nobody has a cubicle. The CEO has his own office.

The noise and interruptions are hurrendous. I am working from home two days a week now because it's impossible to get things done at work.

The general noise level from the other areas is unacceptable. I know we are also guilty of making a racket, I'm not saying we're perfect.

But when I'm in the guts of the server side, and we have a very complicated core server component, I don't want to be interrupted every five minutes by laughter, walk-ups, casual questions from co-workers. Team player bullshit or not, I'm there to engineer a fast, reliable, robust component. When I'm interrupted a lot, my defect rate (number of tickets at 'Defect' level entered against me per release symbol) goes up. Really up. A lot of people wear headphones to block out noise, but there's evidence to suggest that if the brain's cultural centers are engaged, engineers don't make creative leaps. I think this is true.

Plus, as you may know, creative work is usually performed in the psychological state of 'flow', which is intensely focussed concentration. It takes 20 minutes of hard concentration to get into 'flow' and then you can be snapped back out of it instantly by a question or a ringing phone.

I would LOVE to have an office. I would even share it with two other engineers, provided I could pick them.

Hell, I would love to have a cubicle, actually.

The ergonomics of offices and the human aspects are well discussed in Peopleware, but if you don't think you can make change in your organisation, don't read it because you'll be left depressed at how offices are *supposed* to be run.

This sounds a lot like the way that nanobots are assembled in the recent novel Prey.

Anyone interested in nano technology will find this a fascinating novel. A lot of the novel describes some of the science behind nano, and as well as a gripping story, you can actually learn a thing or two.

Nah .. you want to use GNUMP3d which supports streaming MP3s OGGs and other media types.

It's portable perl too, and will stream music to Freeamp, XMMS, etc.

Completely free - unless you want to make a donation.

ARIA have issued several Mark "Chopper" Reid orders (similar to threats). In a prepared statement they said that "full cooperation is expected. I mean, it's very hard to host a website with no fingers."
Electronic Frontiers Australia said "strewth, blimey, look at that little beauty!" before calming themselves down with a Fosters and throwing several prawns on the barby.

Did you know your PDA can also become your phone? Its true and this type of thing isnt going to stop there. You'r PDA may one day function as the remote control to your media collection in your house/car/workplace or tempreture control in home/car etc.

Check out this PCMCIA GSM mobile phone

And the mobile phone in a CF Memory card

PDA's arnt dead. Nor will they be in the short term. PDA's will adapt to become other devices such as mobile phones and remote controls with more hardware and software functionality built into them and also in the form of PCMCIA and other such technologies.

And lets not forget the people who try and combine the functionality of the phone and PDA into one clever device!

I like the phone ad-on idea though (CF/PCMCIA)!

Search code could be this way as well. Randomly change the code and have an external program measure the speed of the searches. If the searches are improving, the external program supports that virus line... if it's get slower, then it would kill it off.

You have pretty much just described a genetic algorithm. I can thoroughly recommend this book as a good starting point for learning about genetic algorithms.

Check out the video to Ben Hur, there's a 5 minute "interlude" included on the video itself which had me chuckling.

It demands to be honoured. Pop out and relieve yourself, AND make a cup of tea, without using the accursed pause button.

'tis for wimps.

Lula, of course :)

Or maybe even this.

Just kidding. However, Deutsch's Fabric of Reality is an accessible and engaging text for the layman like me.

Or maybe even this.

Just kidding. However, Deutsch's Fabric of Reality is an accessible and engaging text for the layman like me.

There were two series of HHGTTG broadcast on the radio, with the second series being waaaaaay different to the storyline in the books.

See amazon.co.uk

Here are the 25th anniversary radio scripts. Very good. Very funny.

I think we need to ask who is this person Strauss and what are his credentials? I'm not familiar with the name. How much software has he written, and how much of it has survived to the present day? What languages does he know, what institutions has he worked for, where did he get his degree, and what was it in? What books has he written and what are his greatest achievements? It might also be interesting to know what systems he has running on his desktop and his laptop.

In short, is he in any way qualified to speak on the subject?

Perhaps he is unaware that on the Internet you are judged by what you have contributed, not what you have consumed.

Recall the two questions that all properly educated schoolchildren should constantly ask, as they listen to their teachers: "How does s/he know?" and "How can I be sure?" (paraphrasing Nicholas Freeling).

How about the paperback which is more readily available (like 24 hours instead of 4-6 weeks)
http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/057507026 9

incidentally, Mike Harrison's novel "LIGHT" was, to my mind, the best SF novel of the last five years. An astonishing piece of work.

This book was harder to find at Amazon than it should have been, mainly because of their full-text search engine being on by default. You can find "Light" available here (or at least get a look at the cover so you can find it at your local store). The author's name is listed as M. John Harrison, and it's not currently published in the U.S.

You could just order the CD online at Amazon. The CD is great.

One camp, vocally led by Bob Bakker and Greg Paul, claims that most dinosaurs (including Tyrannosaurus and Triceratops) were capable of fast motion, of the order of 40mph (72khm), and it is of course this group that's influenced the dinosaurs in the Jurassic Park movies.

Another, probably larger, group argues instead that the locomotory performance of most dinosaurs was more like that of elephants than rhinos, with T. rex for example capable of a fast walk but not a true run.

The evidence is equivocal. rex knees seem to be built in such a way that they were permanently flexed in life, which is a running adaptation, but John Hutchison's study last year appeared to show that the animal would need 70% of its entire body-weight in leg muscles in order to run.

It's a fascinating area, and everyone ought to study it! I particularly recommend starting with R. McNeill Alexander's very approachable book, Dynamics of Dinosaurs and other exinct giants Buy at amazon.com Buy at amazon.co.uk

And a fairly commonly used slogan, too. The guy who is now Mayor of London even paraphrased it for the title of his autobiography. Used in this contect, we can at least celebrate the fact that irony has finally come to the Americas...

This project is absolutely fantastic. We're finally beginning to systematically explore the ocean and the ocean floor. The implications here for technology, environmental studies, education, and research in all sorts of different arenas is staggering.

Agreed. It used to be said we knew more about outer space than the oceans, but finally this is starting to change. If you want to learn more, a good place to start is the amazing BBC documentary
Blue Planet. It contains some of the most beautiful images I have ever seen.

Available for 70, which is only $118.

Now the question is, does Amazon.com charge more than $25 to ship it to the UK.

Good to see. It used to be said we knew more about outer space than most of the oceans, but it is changing.

Check out
The Blue Planet made by the BBC, narrated by David Attenborough. One of the most fascinating documentaries I have ever seen. When they made it, they discovered many new spiecies and behaviour unknown to man.

True. I suppose it comes down to the amount of education on which the country is willing to spend its money.

Drifting wildly off topic, I think the fundamental problem is that education used to be regarded as an unmitigatedly good thing, for both the individual and the nation. A certain PM of the 80s managed to spread the pernicious idea, also (according to Hunter S Thompson) espoused by the Hell's Angels, that "What's 'good' is what's good for me." So people are prepared to pay more for their own children to benefit, but are damned if they are going to pay taxes to benefit society as a whole.

The question is, is it actually beneficial to society as a whole to have an educated population, or are we, the chosen, going to make the proles jump through hoops and sing for their supper if they want a chance of a better life?

<Rampant_Idealism>
I speak as somebody who went to an excellent school courtesy of the eleven plus, then studied at university with a (partial) grant and tuition fees paid. I appreciate that the "academic/factory" perception of child aptitude embodied in the eleven plus was itself fundamentally flawed, but I still think that one way or another, people should be entitled to the same opportunities for personal improvement that I had. (And I strongly believe that education should be about improvement for its own sake, not advancement for the bank's sake.)
</Rampant_Idealism>

Plus, the college textbook market is a racket.

No doubt. I just visited a friend who studies physics at Columbia in New York. One day we walked over to the bookstore, and I was struck by the prizes of some of the required textbooks. One telling example: Ashcroft Mermin - Solid State Physics (don't remember the exact numbers, so I searched amazon)
prize at amazon.com : $121
prize at amazon.co.uk : $61 (36 pounds)

What is the reason for the two-fold increase in prize? No doubt, in the UK they usually have well-equipped libraries for the students to use.

I finally broke down and bought the textbook for my class in compilers from my school bookstore, at a price, including tax, of what amounts to nearly $110 US. Even on amazon.com, it's $84.95.

But, lo and behold, amazon.co.uk has it for the equivalent of less than $47 US!

Good thing I still have my receipt!

This was the topic of my Economics class this afternoon, and I've heard about it from other faculty. The professors at UMPI are considering buying (or have the bookstore buy for them, which is actually an option if we specifically request for the bookstore to order from another place) all of the books for a few classes from Britian as a test run to see how well it works. Even with VAT, shipping, and import taxes, the books generally work out to be aproximately $30 cheaper per book. One example that has been tossed arround is a Systems Design and Analysis class:

Amazon.com (USA) = 127.10 USD

Amazon.com (UK) = 37.99 BPS (british pounds sterling?)


Sources:
USA Amazon

UK Amazon

I used the same ISBN number to get more acurate results, and this is based off of amazon's selling price, *NOT* some third party who you can get it from cheaper in the "New or used" section. granted, the American one is not availible at the moment, but the list price is still there.

I compared one book I needed for this quarter with the listing at the UK site and I noticed this.

Pretty soon books will be like DVD's, and will have a region code to ensure they're only available where the corporations want them to be.

As I recall there was a conference paper in Extreme Programming Perspectives which describes an "infection" model for bug creation, fixing, etc. They were trying to model exactly the effect you describe to see if they could (in a model) find any justification for XP's argument against the increasing cost of bugs through phases. Again, just from memory, they do try to validate the model against figures from real studies.

There's also material in Watts Humphrey's book on the Personal Software Process (about as far from XP as you can get). That book is illustrated throughout with statistics about students who tried to complete the exercises in the book, including in Chapter 13, where there's a section on "The Costs of Finding and Fixing Defects.".

The article is from Chapter 3 of Francis Spufford's "Backroom Boys". I enjoyed the book immensely.

As the subtitle suggests it is unashamedly British in outlook, but celebrates engineering with six anecdotal stories that would warm the heart of any geek (or at least allow them the odd knowing chuckle).

As well as Elite, it covers Britain's space program (Black Arrow, Blue Streak etc.), Concorde (topical), cellphones, the Human Genome, and a reprise on Britain's space program with Beagle 2. Not a proper review I know, but a recommendation all the same.

I see everyone talking how great the ipod is, how great it looks, how good it sounds and that it even does your bed for you in morning . And well, i'm not going to deny that is probably the best portable audio player around. To me the main problem is the price. Here in England the cheapest ipod is selling at 250 pounds. Last week i bought a Sony
Minidisc playerwith MDLP(allowing up to 4x80mins on a single md) and NetMD(transfering mp3s to the md) for just 100 pounds. If had the money i would have definitely have bought the ipod but for many ppl it's simply too expensive.

Without some form of orbital countermeasures, land based objectives would be sitting ducks for all kinds of mischief... ...bioweapon packets launched from satellites, etc. etc.

The only thing I read from Project Gutenburg was Earnest Shackleton's "South" the remarkable story of his expedition to Antarctica that set off in 1914 just the first world war was breaking out. I read it after having seen Channel 4's dramatisation with Kenneth Brannagh.

The expedition went pear shaped but all of the men survived for two years in the Antarctic Circle - camped out on floating pieces of ice, eating penguins and seals, travelling 900 miles across the most inhospitable sea on the planet in an open-topped lifeboat and not one of them died.

It was an interesting read but I'd have preferred a paper version, my eyes hurt when I had finished.

[about the inventor of rockets being the American, Robert Goddard]

>> Well, I don't know much about that so I won't confirm nor deny,
>> but it sounds fishy to me. As far as I know, America hadn't even
>> tested a rocket motor during the time that Van Brown (spelling?)
>> was rolling V2's out onto the pad to launch at England.

and then Steve replied:

>> Goddard succesfully flew the first liquid fueled rocket in 1926.

Steve is correct. History records Goddard as inventing the rocket, and that Wernher Von Braun copied these designs, infringing upon Goddard patents. In fact, if we hadn't been at war, and if Goddard hadn't died during the war, Goddard may have prosecuted these patents. But one thing is for sure - Von Braun admits to basing his work after Goddard's.

versus

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/tg/stores/deta il/reviews/-/books/1560983868/202-9638315-4933460

Excerpted from Aiming for the Stars by Tom D. Crouch. Copyright \

(Robert) Goddard left Roswell in 1941 to work with U.S. Navy and Curtiss-Wright engineers on the development of jet-assisted-takeoff and variable-thrust, liquid-propellant rockets. By the spring of 1944 he was receiving detailed reports on a new German long-range rocket, the V-2. "The weapon is reported to be almost identical with the rocket we were working on in New Mexico at the time we changed over to war work," he wrote to Harry Guggenheim, "except that it is larger."

Goddard provided the editor of the National Geographic News Bulletin with a list of his own patents for almost every aspect of V-2 design. "So closely do the mechanical features of the V-2 parallel the American projectile [Goddard's rocket]," the News Bulletin announced in January 1945, "that some physicists think the Germans may have actually copied most of the design."

That, certainly, was the opinion of Robert Hutchings Goddard. On August 14, 1945, he died of throat cancer, convinced that his work had played a key role in the Germans' success. It simply was not true. The Germans had followed the same path as Goddard, quite unaware that he had been there before them. Under the inspired leadership of Wernher von Braun, they had surged past him without a backward glance, achieving Goddard's goal of sending a rocket to the edge of space.

versus

http://history.msfc.nasa.gov/goddard/history.html

versus

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/6303 26140X?v=glance

And so on...

I'm just saying the history's a little muddied as to whether von Braun actually copied the patents or if their designs were similar based on reading the same literature, doing similar experiments, etc. (c.f., Newton and Leibniz).

-l

Firstly, not wanting to be overly critical, but how long does it take to write-up an interview? Is an interview from June really all that relevant given the amount of stuff that's been posted on the topic in the meantime?

And secondly, is this the Andrew McNabb?

It's worrying to note that the book Writing Secure Code published by Microsoft Press is out of print.

Here you go then... You might want to let Amazon.co.uk know this as well. :)

Read the biography to understand why a movie was a bad idea even when Douglas was working on it. The short version is, if they've been rewriting the script for 20 years (and subsequently rewritten Douglas' many versions), what kind of script do you think is going to result?

This is just an exercise in rights mining: it won't please anyone, and will probably bury comedy SF as a genre.

According to ISBN.nu, amazon.co.uk has it for $21.73, and overstock.com has it for $20.59.

Considering that in the US each single season goes for ~$100, how much could this cost?

Amazon.co.uk has it on pre-order for 338.23 which currently is US $561.66 (excluding exchange costs).

Obligatory affiliate link to item here.

The reason why Nokia got to the dominant market position they enjoy today is because their phones were simple and intuitive to use, and looked sort of cute and non-threatening and accessible, but not to the extent that they came over as toy-like. In a world of disgustingly ugly Ericssons with awful interfaces and Motorolas that were just downright embarrassing, they cleaned up because they appealed to the masses.

Now, though, they seem to be forgetting everything that made them popular. Their devices are becoming ever more contrived in both appearance and functionality, and they're blatantly chasing the zeitgeist instead of telling us all what it was.

Meanwhile, the companies that they so thoroughly trounced have really raised their game, and phones like the Sony Ericsson T610 are exactly the sort of thing you might have expected from Nokia before they started producing phones that look like they've melted in an effort to appeal to tha kidz.

This stupid gadget's yet another example of this silliness. Amazingly, it actually uses elements of a UI layout that Nokia had previously binned because users hated it - well, OK, admittely it's been updated, but several years ago they played with a prototype of a device with the buttons in a row down the side, thinking that it would increase speed of text input for SMS messages, but it turned out it was much worse. There's ample detail about it in this book. Here, instead of one row, they've got two, but apart from that, it's pretty much the same idea they've already rejected. Now tell me they aren't going for form over function.

Oh, and it's a crap shape for putting in your pocket. By my reckoning it's about the size of a 3.5" floppy, maybe a bit smaller. Now look at the way you'll have to hold it in your hand - the broadest diagonal will go right across the palm of your hand. Try picking up a floppy and hold it that way and tell me it's comfortable. And in all likelihood you've got big ol' Western hands - how's it going to go down in Japan? Remember how small those original designed-for-Japan Playstation joypads without the analogue bits felt in your mitts?

Ooh, but isn't it pretty?

here

I can't think of any other author whose characters reach a comparable level of out-and-out badassitude - Gibson doesn't even come close.

You should read some Iain M. Banks then. Some of his seriously badass characters include:
* Horza (Consider Phlebas), the shapechanger whom we meet as he is just about to be drowned in a sewercell.
* Gurgeh (The Player of Games) who has to bet parts of his body on a game with a board the size of a large room.
* Sharrow (Against a Dark Background), the leader of a combat team that has been given a personality-attuning virus that improves their reaction time, now in the Antiquities business, and searching for the fabled Lazy Gun whilst being hunted down by a religious sect.
and my personal favourite,
* Cheradenine Zakalwe (Use of Weapons), one-time fighter pilot based on a tabular iceberg rather than an aircraft carrier, a man sent in by Special Circumstances to do their dirty work for them. The only man known to have shaken off a knife missile that was tailing him, although he did lose his head on Fohls...

I can't think of any other author whose characters reach a comparable level of out-and-out badassitude - Gibson doesn't even come close.

You should read some Iain M. Banks then. Some of his seriously badass characters include:
* Horza (Consider Phlebas), the shapechanger whom we meet as he is just about to be drowned in a sewercell.
* Gurgeh (The Player of Games) who has to bet parts of his body on a game with a board the size of a large room.
* Sharrow (Against a Dark Background), the leader of a combat team that has been given a personality-attuning virus that improves their reaction time, now in the Antiquities business, and searching for the fabled Lazy Gun whilst being hunted down by a religious sect.
and my personal favourite,
* Cheradenine Zakalwe (Use of Weapons), one-time fighter pilot based on a tabular iceberg rather than an aircraft carrier, a man sent in by Special Circumstances to do their dirty work for them. The only man known to have shaken off a knife missile that was tailing him, although he did lose his head on Fohls...

I can't think of any other author whose characters reach a comparable level of out-and-out badassitude - Gibson doesn't even come close.

You should read some Iain M. Banks then. Some of his seriously badass characters include:
* Horza (Consider Phlebas), the shapechanger whom we meet as he is just about to be drowned in a sewercell.
* Gurgeh (The Player of Games) who has to bet parts of his body on a game with a board the size of a large room.
* Sharrow (Against a Dark Background), the leader of a combat team that has been given a personality-attuning virus that improves their reaction time, now in the Antiquities business, and searching for the fabled Lazy Gun whilst being hunted down by a religious sect.
and my personal favourite,
* Cheradenine Zakalwe (Use of Weapons), one-time fighter pilot based on a tabular iceberg rather than an aircraft carrier, a man sent in by Special Circumstances to do their dirty work for them. The only man known to have shaken off a knife missile that was tailing him, although he did lose his head on Fohls...

I can't think of any other author whose characters reach a comparable level of out-and-out badassitude - Gibson doesn't even come close.

You should read some Iain M. Banks then. Some of his seriously badass characters include:
* Horza (Consider Phlebas), the shapechanger whom we meet as he is just about to be drowned in a sewercell.
* Gurgeh (The Player of Games) who has to bet parts of his body on a game with a board the size of a large room.
* Sharrow (Against a Dark Background), the leader of a combat team that has been given a personality-attuning virus that improves their reaction time, now in the Antiquities business, and searching for the fabled Lazy Gun whilst being hunted down by a religious sect.
and my personal favourite,
* Cheradenine Zakalwe (Use of Weapons), one-time fighter pilot based on a tabular iceberg rather than an aircraft carrier, a man sent in by Special Circumstances to do their dirty work for them. The only man known to have shaken off a knife missile that was tailing him, although he did lose his head on Fohls...

So how long before someone develops a cell phone that can be dunked in alcohol or run through the autoclave to sterilize it?

I killed a waterproof watch with alcohol and gasoline. I accidently knocked a gas can over onto my arm and drenched my watch. I tried everything to get the smell out. When I finally soaked it overnight in rubbing alcohol, it got the smell out but it stopped working. I guess alcohol can get in some places that water can't.

Charging it would be interesting. I own the Braun Oral-B 3D toothbrush and it's completely sealed. It has no metal contacts for charging. It must use induction to charge while it's sitting in its cradle.

Allow me to recommend an article from Annals of Improbable Research, most easily available in one of their "Best Of" collections:

David P. Cann and Phillip Pruna
Xerox Enlargement Microscopy
Annals of Improbable Research (1:2), March/April 1995

Too bad the film-scanner folks missed this: could have saved themselves a lot of work.

Right next to Voyage on my bookshelf is Titan by the same author. As Voyage is optimistic, Titan is pessimistic - and, I fear, rather too close to the mark on some issues.