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I haven't seen this book, but I'm gonna look out for it now.

I really did enjoy reading Feynman's accounts of the time which are included in Surely You're Joking, Mr Feynman, his mentions focussed on the safety aspects of designing the storage facilities for the euranium.

Okay, I'm not really on topic.
Almost on topic, and more interesting than most of the rest of this thread :)
I suggest you read Peer-to-Peer: Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies. It's a fascinating insight into the evolution of Peer to Peer networks, and makes the point that some P2P networks actually have a larger mapping of sensible information to IP address than DNS.
TCP/IP is designed for multiple routes, so (in theory) should work very well over a mesh topology, possibly more efficiently than it does now. What is really required for this to function, however, is a way of mapping IP address to geographical location, so that a sensible route can be guessed the first time. With the development of WiFi, it may be possible for base stations to determine the physical location of each other, and generate this information, at least on a local level. (You can't do it very well with cable, since the signal distance over cable is not the same as the straight line distance so knowing the cable distance from 2 points to a third point does not actually give you much information about the location of the third one).

That'd be great, if NASA actually listened to its experts.

You are so right. I'm currently reading The Case For Mars, written by an ex Martin Marietta engineer. They designed and priced a manned mission to Mars using technology available off-the-shelf in the 1990s - in fact, most of it was available in the 1960s. It would cost $20B to develop and $2B/mission, and made use of seemingly obvious common sense. For example, why cart all the fuel for the return trip with you, when you can send an automated device there years beforehand to manufacture rocket fuel (methane + oxygen) from the Martian atmosphere (carbon dioxide) using a process that's been around since the 1890s (not a typo)? And if you don't have to carry all that excess fuel, you don't need to assemble your craft in space, you don't need an orbiting shipyard, etc.

And there was the problem. NASA wanted $450B for a project that did involve orbiting shipyards and fueling stations, in-orbit assembly, a stop off on the moon en route, etc. His proposal faced enormous opposition from all the little cliques and empires within NASA who accused him of "de-justifying" their projects, and who sought in inflate mission requirements in such a way that only their fiefdom could meet.

Why? It all comes down to funding, which comes from the government.

Right now, NASA (in its present form at least) is an obstacle to space exploration. The problems aren't technological any more, they are organizational! But there is a better way. If the governments responsible for funding NASA and ESA were instead to fund a (say) $40B prize for the first organization - private or public, it doesn't matter - to land a team on Mars, carry out a list of experiments or explorations and return safely, then the game changes radically - and we could see humans on Mars this decade.

So what's your solution for gamers in geographical areas where the local cable company does not offer cable Internet access and the telephone company doesn't offer anything faster than ISDN but cheaper than T1?

Is chess a modern game?

OK, not chess, but it's still possible to invent a real-time computer game that's trivially simple to play over dial-up. Just design the play system so that twitches are less important than overall field tactics.

We're talking about games like Madden

22 men? It's possible to encode each's displacement, velocity, and acceleration in about 6 bytes (or less) and fit the whole game state in a single UDP packet. It just shows that good network coding practices, such as having the offensive line done via AI on both sides and dead-reckoning the positions of players, can make games with lots of moving objects still feel fast even over a slow connection.

Furthermore the fact that the system requirements say something is a joke.

My rule of thumb is to take the minimal requirements and double them. That's why I suggested 56K when the requirements stated 28.8.

find the "recommended hardware" instead

Even when taking into account the "recommended" section, the Warcraft III requirements didn't indicate anything greater than 28.8.

If you've actually done it and it works, say so.

Because my main box has a TNT2 and only 128 MB of RAM, and I'm in no financial position to buy more hardware, I have never played Warcraft III, but Warcraft II Battle.net Edition runs just fine over dial-up.

Modem technology is dead.

Then why is only dead technology available in many geographical areas? And why does dead technology have so many more subscribers than not-dead technology?

You cannot play modern games over a modem.

At first glance, that looked like a contradiction: "You cannot play modem games over a modem." But then I realized you had written "ModeRn".

Do chess, checkers, and hearts work over a modem? Yes. Does Warcraft 3 for the PC work on v.90? Yes; according to its system requirements, it even works on 28.8. Even the popular PC first-person shooters still work over 56K, though you get the most fair experience playing against other 56K users rather than against users lucky enough to have broadband move into their town.

>The only solution I can think of would be to come up with a teleportation method that does not involve destruction.

Banks (see The Player of Games for a good example) employs the use of effectors (basically field manipulation) which surround the object or person to be transported and move that part of space to the desired location without destorying the original. Don't think he ever mentions the range these operate on, but the effectors themselves are capable of long range sensing.

Why is that site so incredibly biassed towards US? It's supposed to be international.

> Ever bought a foreign DVD only to discover it
> won't play on your American DVD player? Did you
> have to buy a multi-region player to get around > it?

This isn't anything to with America - it affects all region coded DVD players.

Why not just say "your country". Oh I forgot - America is the only country which matters bomb the rest.

Why does everyone hate America?

The best book I've read in the last few years is All Quiet on the Orient Express by Magnus Mills. Pure gold - short - but brilliant. His other stuff is also good. No science in sight - but quite a strong observational 'bent' which drives the plots.

Paul J MacAuley is an incredibly good writer. He is to our age what Gibson was to the 80's - gibson's predictions about technology are taken on board, but MacAuley's vision of biotech and later, nanotech in the near future is stunning.

In his world gene hackers create psychotropic virii as cheap highs. Later cults spring up, whose utter belief can be transmitted like a disease. Dictators use loyalty plagues to ensure devotion. There is a universal unearned wage in western europe, due to a bioengineered workforce of 'dolls'.

Check out Fairyland and Invisible Country.

Langford's review of Fairyland at amazon explains it a lot better ;)

Yup. Banks Banks Banks! You might need to go to amazon.co.uk to get some of his stuff. Read the culture series, in order!

The book is called Altered Carbon and deals with a world where there is no such thing as death in the traditional sense.

All human conciousness is stored in a cortical implant called a stack which, in the event of death, your conciousness can be downloaded into another body and you continue as the same person albeit possibly in a different body.

The book itself is very violent and has certain shades of William Gibson to it. Fans of Gibson or cyberpunk in general won't be disappointed!

You can read the Amazon reviews of it here.

Z.

Tom Holt: I would suggest starting with Expecting Someone Taller. That was the first Holt I read and certainly one of my favorites.

If you like humorous books, then you can't go wrong with Terry Pratchett. But skip the first couple and start with Equal Rites or Wyrd Sisters. The earlier ones are fine, but he doesn't hit his real stride until those.

And don't pass up on the Harry Potter series just because its a child's book.

Thank goodness for Amazon UK without that, I would never have managed to get all 15-20 Tom Holts that I do own.

Schneier's Secrets & Lies is indeed excellent.

For another excellent but more technical book on security I would recommend Building Secure Software.

Building Secure Software has a foreward by Schneier in which he writes: "Read it; learn from it. And then put its lessons into practise."

Chapter 4 in the book is "On Open Source and Closed Source".

A most own book if you are interested in software security.

Then you want Java Enterprise Best Practises

Spitired Away

Multinational. Multinational.

Yeah, I'm afraid.

We all have ideas about what the future is going to be like. But almost without fail, I am corrected in one direction; Jennifer Government , sprawl and caste.

*sigh

*Ahem*. AFAIK there are no other western countries seriously considering teaching "creationism" in schools alongside or instead of evolution and natural selection. I think the US has more or less cornered the market on falling ass-backwards back into the dark ages. Read any book by Stephen Baxter, but in particular Titan, for a dark view of where this might lead.

For those of you who can't wait for the North American release of the first season, you can order it up from Amazon.co.uk. The second season is also available. The down side is that you need a region-free or European DVD player to watch 'em. The director's commentaries are hilarious! Well worth the $$$.

For those of you who can't wait for the North American release of the first season, you can order it up from Amazon.co.uk. The second season is also available. The down side is that you need a region-free or European DVD player to watch 'em. The director's commentaries are hilarious! Well worth the $$$.

This misapplication of outmoded laws is a direct result of the media and justice systems being run by the Washington fat cats and the Jewish media moguls in New York and Hollywood.

Sigh. If you want to read some good journalism on the "Jewish Conspiracy" check out this book by Jon Ronson. It's called "Them: Adventures with Extremists." You can read an interview with the author here. He basically investigates cults of all forms and sees what's true and what's not. Spoiler: A lot of it's true but not at all in the way you think. It's a great read. Until then, knock that unsubstantiated, mildly racist shit off, will you?

Triv

And some interesting and occasionally humorous anecdotes about this sort of thing (but not so much in the IT sector) can be found in the book Sabotage in the American Workplace.

Would now be a good time to plug this and this? ;)

Actually I'd rather you used any spare cash for some charity nearby - wherever you live, a nice local project whose results you can feel.

(I'm bad with charity I refuse to donate money to poeple far away who I don't know, but I'm happy to donate to local groups and causes. I hope that doesn't make me a bad person - I view it as a good way of narrowing down the millions of charities in the world to a small group whom I can donate what little spare I have ).

It may not have been declared a war by the US Government, but it was certainly a war as far as the Vietnamese were concerned, and the CIA consider it a war "His study shows that CIA analysts had a firm grasp of the situation in Vietnam and continually expressed doubts that heightened US military pressure alone could win the war."

there was no new expansion into South Vietnam

Huh? So who was streaming into Saigon (now Ho Chi Mihn City - named after the communist leader in the north - might give you a clue) as the US troops fled from their embassy? The entire country has been united under communuist rule since 1975. Or are you suggesting that there was no new expansion outside of Vietnam, such as in Cambodia, where the Vietnamese invaded in 1978 to fight the US-supported Khmer Rouge. (you might want to read "Heroes" by John Pilger for eye witness accounts of both events)

And are you seriously claiming that the US achieved their objectives in Vietnam? They must really teach you some strange things at school over there.

It stars Donald Pleasance as a police inspector trying to find out why people are mysteriously disappearing from the Underground late at night. Turns out a bunch of cannibals (descended from Victorian railway workers who got trapped during the building of the line) are living in the disused Museum station and nipping out for a "takeaway" late at night. It's gruesome in places but rather funny.

I've read much of Stephen Hawking's work, and while he may be very smart, I really don't think he is a particularly good at explaining concepts to the layman.

I find John Gribbin and Paul Davies to be much better.

If you enjoy this stuff, I would heartily suggest:

John Gribbin, "In Search of Schrodinger's Cat" - great intro to quantum mechanics. The sequel is also very good.
Paul Davies, "God and the New Physics " and "The Mind of God" - more general, thought-provoking discussion of science and the world.

Finally, is it possible for two different programmers to look at the same source code and have strongly differing opinions about its quality, or is it a pretty much agreed upon criteria?

What matters is the elegance of the thought behind the code. Simply put, it is code that transforms its inputs into its outputs using the fewest possible number of operations, variables, etc, and correctly handles unusual or unexpected inputs without behaving unpredictably. Coincidentally elegant code tends to be easy to maintain and efficient to execute, but these two factors alone are insufficient to make a piece of code elegant.

If you are interested in this sort of thing, I recommend reading Knuth, generally reckoned to be the greatest authority on such things.

So, does anyone know where I can buy the UK English editions of Tintin?

Here?

Amazon.co.uk (link to a 272-item result set for author "Herge")

Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds? Dear oh dear. Phasers to kill, isn't it?

Amazon has Godel in the uk at this link

here it is

IF you want the original paper for it sake if you want it free I don't know if it is out there.

Complex systems have more individual breakdowns than simple systems because they have more components to break. But, they are less likely to collapse than simple systems.

I strongly suggest you read this. A quick summary is that complex societies are vulnerable because of the investment they need to make in creating the complexity and the overhead needed to maintain it. Complex societies can "fade away" when the overhead of maintaining the complexity does not generate a return; this happened to the Romans, whose decline took centuries, as a greater and greater proportion of the economy's capacity had to be diverted into maintaining complexity. In more recent times it happened to the Soviet Empire. Note that the collapse of these particular societies wasn't cataclysmic; the people were mostly OK, the political structures weren't.

Or they can collapse abruptly because they have no slack built in... if you are a simple society with lots of people working on vanity projects like monumental architecture (say temples or cities or pyramids or whatever), then you have plenty of capacity that can be reassigned; it would be very easy to turn this mass of people into an army if you needed one, or detach some temporarily for disaster relief, or permanently to become farmers. It's all different sorts of manual labour anyway, so you can re-skill people quickly and easily. Any advanced society that abruptly and mysteriously disappeared probably did so because it faced a cataclysm it couldn't cope with.

But in a complex and efficient society where everyone has a specialized role with hard-to-learn skills, there is no spare capacity and even if there was, you couldn't train those people fast enough to deal with a crisis. These societies collapse abruptly.

External FM transmitter adaptors are widely available from Radio Shack and the like.

A survey of reviews will inform you that most people are quite disappointed in their sound quality:

• Dr Botts
• Comments on several models
• another one

Basically, the impression I get from comments I've seen about these it that they work OK if you have no other option, but if you can at all manage a miniplug-to-RCA, or even a cassette adaptor, they'll sound better.

This was the premise of a book titled Decipher. Well, one of the premises. Check it out at Amazon

This is the same author who wrote the screenplay of 51st State / Formula 51 (depending on where you live)

No such list would be complete without Peter Hamilton's Nightsdawn, even if it does make Lord of the Rings look like a novella.

<Votes to have all those awful Jules Verne books nuked in favour of The Reality Dysfunction and Greg Bear's Queen of Angels>

No such list would be complete without Peter Hamilton's Nightsdawn, even if it does make Lord of the Rings look like a novella.

<Votes to have all those awful Jules Verne books nuked in favour of The Reality Dysfunction and Greg Bear's Queen of Angels>

No such list would be complete without Peter Hamilton's Nightsdawn, even if it does make Lord of the Rings look like a novella.

<Votes to have all those awful Jules Verne books nuked in favour of The Reality Dysfunction and Greg Bear's Queen of Angels>

Something to consider might be what SQL database you will be working with. If you'll be working with either Oracle or Access this book will be helpful. If not, I suggest looking at things like Managing Using MySQL by O'Reilly.

I would suggest not, because you will learn bad habits, and they will be hard to shake once you start working on a real database (Oracle, Sybase, SAP-DB, etc). I have seen MySQL programmers do massively inefficient (and stupid) things like retrieve a list of keys from one table, store them in an in-memory array, then loop through the array executing a select for each key in another table - because they didn't know about subselects. I've seen them put all sorts of redundant validation crap in the middle tier because they didn't know about constraints and triggers. I could go on and on...

If you want to learn SQL, you first need a solid general foundation like this (I have an earlier edition) then later study the extensions that each vendor provides (Oracle PL/SQL, Sybase T-SQL, etc).

The situation is not black and white, but it is white enough in Israel's general direction and black enough in the Arab world to justify taking sides against the violence perpetrated by Arabs and siding with the retaliation performed by the Israelis.

I recommend reading Longitudes and Attitudes by Thomas Friedman for a greater grasp of Mideast affairs post-9/11.

In A World Out Of Time (published in the 70s, as I recall), Larry Niven described a system like this. In fact, the hero travels in just such an evacuated tube transit system but it's leaky, so the pressure in the car drops during the journey... I'll let you go find a copy of the book to see whether he survived.

To be exact, I don't recall the book mentioning anything about the propulsion system, but the principle of the evacuated tube was clear and Niven being who he is, I'm sure that he was referring to a system that was being discussed in public when he wrote the book.

Anna B

I see a lot of those, so much so that I now include an integrated bug reporting plugin in my application.

This has proved to be a double edges sword - on the one hand the plugin ensures I have all the details that I'll probably need of the system, (OS program version, memory size, etc), but it makes it almost too easy to report a bug - instead of reading the fine documentation.

Personally I've spent hours working with some users to fix a bug in my code, and I'm happy to do so .. if I get one person who sees the bug and reports it then it's probably fair to say that 20 people see the bug and uninstall the software, never to return.

If people are greatful for my work/fixes they can reward me if they wish ;)

it looks like everyone is buying up all the copies. i'm sure amazon uk will be selling out soon too, but it cost me $13 including shipping to california.

and as an added bonus you get to read everything with an english accent.

The Wrox P2P title Beginning Linux Programming, by Richard Stones and Neil Matthew, covers some similar ground: makefiles, shell scripts, some basic C, Perl and TCL (not really basic - they show you how to use these languages to do some typical linux-y things, rather than explain about structs and scalars), an introduction to GTK and a chapter at the end on writing device drivers. If you're an intermediate-level programmer unfamiliar with Linux as a programming environment, this book offers a good way in; recommended for VB weenies with a conscience.

In other words, a modern version of....
Techno-Trousers!

Unless you're a TV fan. Try to buy South Park Season 4 on Region 1 DVD - you can't, because it's still in reruns here. Only available in Region 2.

• HMV Canada - their selection of music beats Amazon.com hands down. Doing a search reveals that they sell "Funker Vogt"
• Amazon Germany - great source for music tailored to the german market. The only catch is that you need to understand German (quite normal really ;)
• Amazon UK - great source for music tailored to the german market.
• HMV UK
• HMV Germany
• FNAC - online version of the French media store

BTW If you want to know what is hot in th UK, then BBC1 Radio 1 is a good site, and IMO is info-marketing ratio is 9:1, which is nice to see.

On the surface, this sounds remarkably like "Atomised" by Michel Houellebecq. Similar ideas, wrapped in a highly readable (and distrubing) novel. Published as "Elementary Particles" in the US.

Firstly, it greatly improved my vocabulary, since the meaning of many unknown English words can be guessed if you can spot the 'root' of the word.

It also helped with foreign languages (French, Spanish and other 'Romance' languages, obviously) and while I was working in Germany, and I didn't know the German word for something and the guy I was speaking to didn't know the English, we used the latin word!

Plus it can make you seem highly educated :)

I recommend Lingua Latina Occasionibus Omnibus as a humourous primer to the language :)

Mark

And in the UK, there's a paperback at £7.99.

The Canadian and the UK books are from Doubleday UK while the US one is from HarperCollins.

I lestened to the radio series back before there was a novelisation of a TV version. It was groundbreaking in that it actually used the medium to its limits.

DNA's plots were often a case of him figuratively painting the story into a corner, an pulling a solution out at the last second. I highly recommend the radio scripts for more juicy tidbits.

Here's hoping that H2G2: The Motion Picture is truthful to the original vision. Hells, if they can get Stephen Moore to speak the part of Marvin, I would be one swotting happy frood.

The director was Ivan Reitman and this was before he directed Ghostbusters. There is all sorts of information from Douglas Adams in The Salmon of Doubt (which includes what was written of the Dirk Gently novel he was working on when he died, along with essays, articles and interviews from him.) Well worth getting hold of if you are at all a fan.

I'm quietly confident about the quality of the movie as DNA has said he is very confident in Jay Roach, who is directing it. It is going to cover the first book, or as he said in one of the interviews, "It's funny, because I've been looking around the Web at what people have been saying. I've seen, "He's going to put all five books into it." People just don't understand the way a book maps onto a movie. Somebody said, and I think quite accurately, that the best source material for a movie is a short story. Which effectively means, yes, it's going to be the first book. Having said that, whenever I sit down to do another version of Hitchhiker, it highly contradicts whichever version went before. The best thing I can say about the movie is that it will specifically contradicting the first book."