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And why aren't the US getting the same trippy cases the UK are getting?

As in here: amazon.co.uk

I can't seem to find any in the US that look like this - the US one's all look like the XFiles box sets...

Cheers,
Richard

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005UO5 M (series 1, 4th March 2002)

We're way ahead on Buffy as well.

Now if only we could keep up for movie releases.

The minister is (amongst other things) responsible for 'equality' and therefore pushes the plan to provide the less fortunate with a pc.

This smells like a belated attempt to jump on the Internet bandwagon to me. Why don't citizens get equal automobiles issued to them at the voting age? Why aren't citizens assigned to identical housing units? Why don't citizens queue every week at the supermarket to collect their equal shopping baskets of goods?

I strongly recommend that anyone who favors the idea of spending so much money on computers read Silicon Snake Oil by Clifford Stoll. In this book, he presents a compelling argument that, in education, the money would far better be spent on hiring more and better teachers, and actually taking the kids to museums rather than sitting them down in front of PCs loaded with CDROM encylopaedias. And in business, computers aren't the productivity panacea that they're touted as.

And, on /. at least, I would have expected a little more skepticism of a proposal that would give a government complete and unrestricted access to the majority of its citizens email accounts and hard drives. Would you be willing to sell your freedoms for some shiny new consumer electronics?

Michael Ignatieff has book, partly on this subject, which I recommend. It's called (somewhat unfortunately) Virtual War. Using the US-allied nations' air war in against Milosovic in Kosovo, it asks what are the consequences are of technologically advanced nations being able to wage war with impunity.

The enormous modern investment in war-at-a-distance technologies like combat drones and high-altitude precision bombing is largely due to the fact that a war without casualties is a lot easier for a government to wage, politically speaking, than one where its people are put directly in harm's way.

Contrast the difference between WWI, where tens of thousands of soldiers combatants died in individual battles, with the Gulf War, where the loss of one pilot incites media frenzy?

As we become increasingly able to do so, the author asks, what does it mean to be willing to kill for something you're not willing to die for?

If Duke Nukem Forever has no release date, why does Amazon list it as being released on 8 March, 2002?? It has it on it's pre-order list....maybe there is light at the end of the tunnel.........

Or alternatively: http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00005NCE Z/o/qid%3D1010095826/sr%3D8-1/ref%3Dsr%5Faps%5Fvg% 5F1%5F1/026-6218755-4392446

two words, HOLY SHIT!

Our Price: £27.99

Platform: Windows 95, Windows 98

Release Date: 8 March, 2002. Not Yet

Available: You may still order this product.

We will ship it to you when it is released by the manufacturer

Why not put it on the Dark Side of the Sun?

You wrote:

Yes and no. The DVD player just takes the signal on the disk and dumps it out to your TV, projector, etc. Generally the player doesn't care if the signal on the disk is PAL, SECAM, or NTSC.

Nothing is encoded on the DVD as NTSC or PAL or SECAM.

That is to say, I live in the USA, and I personally have a copy of ' South Park: vol 4 ', as released in Region 2. This disk is clearly labeled as 'PAL'.

I can play this disk in a 'region free' Apex player on my NTSC television, and it works fine because the Apex internally does the conversion from PAL to NTSC.

A friend of mine has another brand of 'region free' DVD player, and while the player plays the disk, his TV displays a severely distorted picture.

In other words:
DISKS CONTAIN PAL CONTENT, OR NTSC CONTENT, OR BOTH. A PAL DISK WILL NOT DISPLAY CORRECTLY ON A NTSC-ONLY AMERICAN TELEVISION SET.

I know this both from references and from personal experience. If you claim otherwise, prove me wrong.

• http://dvddemystified.com/dvdfaq.html#1.19
• http://www.dvdspecialty.com/faqs.html
• http://www.horrordvds.com/extras/articles/palntsc/

My amazon.co.uk wishlist has been my saviour this year. Throughout the year, when I've seen cool stuff, I just added to it, then when I sent out christmas cards, I included the url ;-)

I've got Bill & Ted on DVD, The Lord of the Rings boxed set, and, what every geek should want for Christmas this year, Linux Mandrake 8.1 (thanks, Dad!). It's a testament to Mandrake that I can have it installed on Christmas morning by 11am (with a stinking hangover, too!) with about three mouseclicks. However, the one book that's going to get me through all the holiday season parties, Bartending for Dummies, I can't thank you enough, mum!

Anyway, Merry Christmas to everyone, here's to peace and happiness to you all.

--jon

My amazon.co.uk wishlist has been my saviour this year. Throughout the year, when I've seen cool stuff, I just added to it, then when I sent out christmas cards, I included the url ;-)

I've got Bill & Ted on DVD, The Lord of the Rings boxed set, and, what every geek should want for Christmas this year, Linux Mandrake 8.1 (thanks, Dad!). It's a testament to Mandrake that I can have it installed on Christmas morning by 11am (with a stinking hangover, too!) with about three mouseclicks. However, the one book that's going to get me through all the holiday season parties, Bartending for Dummies, I can't thank you enough, mum!

Anyway, Merry Christmas to everyone, here's to peace and happiness to you all.

--jon

My amazon.co.uk wishlist has been my saviour this year. Throughout the year, when I've seen cool stuff, I just added to it, then when I sent out christmas cards, I included the url ;-)

I've got Bill & Ted on DVD, The Lord of the Rings boxed set, and, what every geek should want for Christmas this year, Linux Mandrake 8.1 (thanks, Dad!). It's a testament to Mandrake that I can have it installed on Christmas morning by 11am (with a stinking hangover, too!) with about three mouseclicks. However, the one book that's going to get me through all the holiday season parties, Bartending for Dummies, I can't thank you enough, mum!

Anyway, Merry Christmas to everyone, here's to peace and happiness to you all.

--jon

My amazon.co.uk wishlist has been my saviour this year. Throughout the year, when I've seen cool stuff, I just added to it, then when I sent out christmas cards, I included the url ;-)

I've got Bill & Ted on DVD, The Lord of the Rings boxed set, and, what every geek should want for Christmas this year, Linux Mandrake 8.1 (thanks, Dad!). It's a testament to Mandrake that I can have it installed on Christmas morning by 11am (with a stinking hangover, too!) with about three mouseclicks. However, the one book that's going to get me through all the holiday season parties, Bartending for Dummies, I can't thank you enough, mum!

Anyway, Merry Christmas to everyone, here's to peace and happiness to you all.

--jon

My amazon.co.uk wishlist has been my saviour this year. Throughout the year, when I've seen cool stuff, I just added to it, then when I sent out christmas cards, I included the url ;-)

I've got Bill & Ted on DVD, The Lord of the Rings boxed set, and, what every geek should want for Christmas this year, Linux Mandrake 8.1 (thanks, Dad!). It's a testament to Mandrake that I can have it installed on Christmas morning by 11am (with a stinking hangover, too!) with about three mouseclicks. However, the one book that's going to get me through all the holiday season parties, Bartending for Dummies, I can't thank you enough, mum!

Anyway, Merry Christmas to everyone, here's to peace and happiness to you all.

--jon

My amazon.co.uk wishlist has been my saviour this year. Throughout the year, when I've seen cool stuff, I just added to it, then when I sent out christmas cards, I included the url ;-)

I've got Bill & Ted on DVD, The Lord of the Rings boxed set, and, what every geek should want for Christmas this year, Linux Mandrake 8.1 (thanks, Dad!). It's a testament to Mandrake that I can have it installed on Christmas morning by 11am (with a stinking hangover, too!) with about three mouseclicks. However, the one book that's going to get me through all the holiday season parties, Bartending for Dummies, I can't thank you enough, mum!

Anyway, Merry Christmas to everyone, here's to peace and happiness to you all.

--jon

Also, you may want to grab a copy of any of the following books and look at a modern re-incornation of communist ideas. Please also note that freedom is not always free, even when it comes to freeest speech country (not all of these books are available in US).

The link is dead, here is another one (same one?) - But I don't take it seriously since Peter F. Hamilton isn't even on the list - His Nights Dawn Trilogy is simply amazing! It's among the best SF I've ever read!

Read them, they're The Reality Dysfunction (I want a hard cover of this one!) - The Neutronium Alchemist and The Naked God - They are AWESOME!

I'm currently reading his new book Fallen Dragon - and although it doesn't compare with the epic Night's Dawn trilogy, it's actually a very good book!

The link is dead, here is another one (same one?) - But I don't take it seriously since Peter F. Hamilton isn't even on the list - His Nights Dawn Trilogy is simply amazing! It's among the best SF I've ever read!

Read them, they're The Reality Dysfunction (I want a hard cover of this one!) - The Neutronium Alchemist and The Naked God - They are AWESOME!

I'm currently reading his new book Fallen Dragon - and although it doesn't compare with the epic Night's Dawn trilogy, it's actually a very good book!

The link is dead, here is another one (same one?) - But I don't take it seriously since Peter F. Hamilton isn't even on the list - His Nights Dawn Trilogy is simply amazing! It's among the best SF I've ever read!

Read them, they're The Reality Dysfunction (I want a hard cover of this one!) - The Neutronium Alchemist and The Naked God - They are AWESOME!

I'm currently reading his new book Fallen Dragon - and although it doesn't compare with the epic Night's Dawn trilogy, it's actually a very good book!

The link is dead, here is another one (same one?) - But I don't take it seriously since Peter F. Hamilton isn't even on the list - His Nights Dawn Trilogy is simply amazing! It's among the best SF I've ever read!

Read them, they're The Reality Dysfunction (I want a hard cover of this one!) - The Neutronium Alchemist and The Naked God - They are AWESOME!

I'm currently reading his new book Fallen Dragon - and although it doesn't compare with the epic Night's Dawn trilogy, it's actually a very good book!

The link is dead, here is another one (same one?) - But I don't take it seriously since Peter F. Hamilton isn't even on the list - His Nights Dawn Trilogy is simply amazing! It's among the best SF I've ever read!

Read them, they're The Reality Dysfunction (I want a hard cover of this one!) - The Neutronium Alchemist and The Naked God - They are AWESOME!

I'm currently reading his new book Fallen Dragon - and although it doesn't compare with the epic Night's Dawn trilogy, it's actually a very good book!

Good reading for those seeking the myths behind the Middle Earth is Kalevala which is the saga and tales of the Finnish people. Tolkien was greatly impressed and influenced by the Kalevala, specially Silmarillion has many similarities to Kalevala. Tolkien also studied the Finnish language and used it to create the Elf language.

..is that they recommend to do all this "...with free implementations of win32 (Wine)...".

This is plainly hilarious.

I know that cygwin will compile under Wine. But using it under Wine to run dpkg ... the idea is just beyond my mind!

Let me quote the whole parragraph:

This port is meant to run on any win32 implementation. Some win32
implementations are free (wine, reactos), others are not (microsoft).
free implementations are of course recommended and cygwin is proven
to work fine on wine.

Who had the idea in the first place? Terry Gillian? Pratchet? Benny Hill? Jay Leno? Chiquito de la Calzada?

How could anybody want anything other than The Complete James Bond Collection on DVD??

PRICE: £254.99

This is a cheap knock-off of a much better british show called Ready Steady Cook. The premise involved two average joe contentests. Each one brings £5 worth of random food, which the celebrity chefs have to make into something in 30 minutes..

Seems like it was quite popular. There are even a variety of books. that evolved from the show..

Of course they didn't stop there, the same folks came out with Can't Cook, Won't Cook. A truly terrible show...

Iain Banks Culture stories are fantastic!

I'd recommend Consider Phlebas to someone starting out.

Use of Weapons, Excession, and Player of Games are excellant as well.

NTK noticed this book at Amazon

Surely Illiad could've come up with a better cover?...

When I was about six or seven, I used to love reading Richard Scarry books, especially the ones about how things work. I loved taking things to bits and putting them back together -- or at least trying to! I always hope that when I have children, they'll be interested in those kinds of things too, so I can build them the cool robots I just learned about in class today! ;-)

Just wondering, in the experience of the parents (or researchers) among us, to what extent are children's interests affected by the interests of their parents?

This stuff scares the hell out of me. We are not teaching our kids to think or research. We are teaching them how to let a computer figure it out instead.

Mod the parent back up, please. For an explanation, read Silicon Snake Oil by Clifford Stoll (who also wrote Cuckoo's Egg). Summary: computers are pretty much useless un education between the ages of 6 and 16. The money would be better spent on museums visits and field trips than on multimedia CD Roms, and on hiring great teachers rather than on bandwidth.

Even the best search engine can only answer questions, it cannot teach how to ask new questions. A word processor can't help you with what to right. A spreadsheet will work out numbers for you, it can't tell you if what you are modelling even makes sense.

Parents who let their kids be educated by laptop are as guilty as parents who dump their kids in front of the TV their whole time. It's simply abdicating responsibility.

Besides - when I see a commercial saying "OWN it on DVD or VHS today" - the whole concept of 'licensing' seems somewhat suspect...

They let you own a physical copy, with the restriction that you cannot exhibit it anywhere except a private home. No hospitals, oil rigs, airplanes, schools, etc.

I wonder whether, or how, an instructor could get full, proper permission to show a film to a class. For example, in a film studies course.

I completely agree with your point though. People are accustomed to the idea of owning a physical copy -- with certain restrictions...like you can't make copies and sell them, you can't charge admission to 500 people, and various other things.

But people are not going to buy into some further restrictions (see my post "Liquid Audio anyone?").

I think one reason DVD region coding is not an issue for most people in the USA is that most people will never encounter a DVD other than region 1 without specifically seeking it out. And then how many people other than me are looking for Orson Welles' MacBeth and David Lynch's Eraserhead? On the other hand, folks in region 2,3,4,5,6 are supposed to be denied access to a great many films. Wander around IMDB or search for your favorite Hollywood films on Amazon UK and see what you cannot buy.

The really scary parts of marketing are that:

We (geeks) are good at it.

It's fun !

Occasionally I've got involved in marketing (I can handle it, honest, I've just got a bit of a cold at the moment). The surprising ease of it and the ease by which it's possible to not only do it, but to get it right , makes me even more convinced that Scott Adam's view is right (marketing people are those who can't play piano well enough for a brothel). If you're going to play ball with consumerism, then you need to look at marketing. The fact that the field is full of extremely stupid people without the brains of a HR droid shouldn't put you off making your own marketing work right.

#ob_karma_whore
Paco Underhill's book Why We Buy, is a great intro to common sense applied to retail marketing. Much off it works for e-comm sites too.

the current incarnation of XSL stinks.

It doesn't stink, it just smells different. It's a functional language, not a procedural language, and those of us who didn't grow up at MIT still find that a bit weird. There's certainly a culture shock, but once you start to get it, then it's no harder than anything else.

There's nothing wrong with variables that you can't change the value of ! You just need to lose that inate fear of recursion most of us procedural people still carry around.

XPath does look a bit like Martian, granted, but it's no worse than regexes.

A really good text on XSLT needs to go beyond the reprinted standard level, and Michael Kay's is pretty good for that. Lots of useful cookbook stuff, and the 2nd edition is also well up to date.

Now xmlns:xsl="http://www.w3.org/TR/WD-xsl" used to pong a bit... Nested templates ? Blaurgh !

Appeasement NEVER works

Unfortunately, you are completely right. History bears you out *without exception*.

"Jaw, jaw is better than War, war". Yup. True. Except it *doesn't fucking work*".

Ultimately, you have to blow the dust off your old copy of von Clausewitz "On War", and do something nasty. Accept that a lot of your people will die. Have a clear objective. Make use of everything you have. And remember your ancient history.

After the third war, no trace of Great Carthage remained

I refused to buy three and four in hardback as well, I couldn't believe the US publishers were so greedy as to even now still offer three only in hardback - so I bought mine from England for not much more than the cost of the softcover books here, even with shipping!

I'm not sure how the "adult versions" they refer to differ from the normal versions - perhaps a bit extra content?

In addition to his wonderful fiction, Tolkien was a linguist and an expert on Anglo-Saxon languages. A collection of his lectures, aptly entitled The Monsters and the Critics, reviewed here includes one "On Translating Beowulf."
And no collection of Tolkiena would be complete without Letters from Father Christmas, a collection of letters Tolkien wrote to his kids over the years beginning in the 1930s. They were painstakingly illustrated, down to the North Pole postage stamps. You can see his style develop over the years, from straightforward tales of mishaps at the North Pole, often including a clumsy polar bear, to escalating wars between armies of trolls and dwarves.

Years ago, when I first read LOTR, I found that a most invaluable aid was Barbara Strachey's Journeys of Frodo

A guide to where the gang were at any given time, beautifully illustrated with cartographic accuracy.

Admit it. Who bought The HTML book because:

• It was just a good HTML book
• You always liked her Usenet .sigs
• Having nuclear weapons will always appeal to geeks

It strips long .com addresses down to the SLD and TLD. So what would it make of Amazon's UK operations?

another trilogy extension

Ursula le Guin's Earthsea trilogy ?
(if you're the age I am, and read the first three long ago, then go and find the more recent fourth book - very different, and well worth the read)

TAOCP is a 7 volume set - always has been. He just took his time getting around to >3.

OTOH, Trilogy (capitalised) and CML should be burnt at the stake. 8-(

It usually seems to be the other way around. Wonder what the delay is - syndication rights in N.A., maybe?

LOL.... no this is a cool joke!! I presume you are referring to Fermat's comment in the margin on his notebook about having the solution to his own theorem.

I just read Fermat's Last Theorem by Simon Singh a month ago and I loved it.

-Kraft

FWIW, here are some links to chat interviews with the Cathy Rogers and Robert Llewellyn about Junk Yard Wars/Scrapheap Challenge and how they set things up, how the heap is seeded, whether the teams even find all the good stuff, and the flexibility of "the last hour". These chats answer almost all of the questions and accusations thrown around elsewhere in this topic...

Channel 4 chat session with Cathy Rogers

Channel 4 chat session with Robert Llewellyn

There's even a Scrapheap Challenge video, for those of you in the UK, or with access to a PAL VCR. It reportedly contains some amusing out-takes.

In its third year, "Scraphead Challenge" is one of Channel 4's most successful Sunday evening series, with a regular audience of over three million viewers. It's a knockout competition for amateur engineers - each week, two new teams of madcap mechanics have to work against the clock to build a specific machine from whatever junk they can scavenge. "Behind the Scenes at Scrapheap Challenge" looks at what goes on behind the camera as well as on screen, using six case studies from the series and scores of colour photographs. The teams have just ten hours to come up with the goods and get one step nearer to the season finale. The book follows the would-be engineers and presenters Robert Llewellyn and Cathy Rodgers' progress as the competition hots up. Through the interviews with the cast and crew, we discover what it's really like to take up the "Scrapheap Challenge".

http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/034079500 X/

I know its amzon but hey
try also madaboutbooks.com

john jones

clumsy-o.af
tree-and-le.af
archers-of-lo.af

I've never read it, though I think I did see some magazine extracts. The reader's review on Amazon found it interesting, but was dubious about how much weight the experimental evidence deserved.

Can anybody else give an opinion on the book ?

Have a read of The Innovators Dilemma - When New Technologies Cause Great Firms to Fail - One of the main examples used throughout the book is how the hard disk industry is moving very rapidly, but that even innovative companies breaking new ground in the market, and keeping their customers sweet, still fail and die. I don't have my copy with me, but there was an interesting diagram in the first few chapters, showing how solid state disks are catching up, and will overtake hard disks, in the next few years.

is it cos i is black?

It's impossible to crack this stuff. It's so impossible, my cow-orkers build a dozen of these systems a week, and they're absolutely rock-solid bulletproof. We already have the technology to do this, and it's even affordable to put them into consumers pockets. If you want them anonymous, we can do that. If you want them traceable, we can do that. If you want (and this is the clever one) them to be anonymous, yet irrefutable, we can even do that.

Book plug: Best text out there is Stefan Brands' Rethinking Public Key Infrastructures

Of course you're right - they're easily crackable. Some pointy-hair will misunderstand it, or an overworked contractor in a bank won't be allowed time to do it right, or (FFS!) someone will let M$oft implement any of it. It will be broken, and it will be some stupid trivial hole that does it.

Solution: buy your copies from amazon.co.uk instead. The shipping's a bugger, of course, but a Pratchett purist will appreciate the trouble spent.

This is a really good book just like every other pratchett book. I do however prefer to get my pratchett books from amazon.co.uk mainly because the covers are nicer in my opinion. -Chris