Slashdot Mirror

blamanj writes "As reporters and researchers depend more and more heavily on the Internet as a research tool, manipulation of the net becomes a serious problem. A recent Slashdot article discussed this in regard to the White House. Now, The Memory Hole has noticed that Time magazine has pulled an article by Bush, Sr. on why it was a bad idea to try and overthrow Saddam. How can we keep corporate America honest?" Update: 11/11 22:16 GMT by T : Declan McCullagh (former Time, Inc. employee, among other things) writes in with the non-conspiracy explanation for the change, below.

Declan writes "It is silly to claim that Bush Sr. and Scowcroft would strong-arm Time Inc. into removing an article from time.com -- when that article was an excerpt from their book that you can buy today from Amazon.com for $21.

Another explanation is more likely. And, yes, a quick search turns up a May 2003 article from Slate that debunks this rumor. It turns out that Time Inc. only had permission from the publisher to post the content for a limited time."

fatarfy writes "USA Today among others has an article discussing tonight's presentation of Brian Greene's Elegant Universe, which discusses String Theory. It airs on PBS. From the article: 'The two segments of the show turn their spotlights on a crisis in physics, one invisible to the general public but increasingly embarrassing to the discipline. Simply put, Einstein's unbelievably accurate explanation of gravity, known as general relativity, is completely out of whack with the equally accurate explanation of electromagnetism, radioactivity and atomic forces known as quantum mechanics. The theories are mankind's most fundamental views of verifiable reality, and the disagreement means that something important about the universe eludes our understanding.' Sounds like it's worth watching."

The Importance of writes "Yesterday, Slashdot readers discussed Amazon's brand new, technically impressive and highly useful book search feature that lets users search the full text of over 120,000 books. Today, the Authors Guild is saying that the publishers don't have the right to let Amazon do this. Uh oh."

Muddie writes "Amazon is carrying the complete works of The Far Side. Weighing in at about 19 pounds, it features over 4,000 cartoons, including 19 Larson made after retirement, letters from readers, and more packed into 1,250 pages in 2 hardcover books boxed as a set for about USD$95. My life is complete."

m00nun1t writes "Amazon have launched a new service that allows you to search the full text of books. This sounds like an incredibly useful function as well as technically impressive at this scale. I wonder if a patent is in the works." Or if a patent is already owned.

mblase writes "The NYTimes has an article (free reg required, someone'll post the Google link any minute now) about how the Internet has trumped capitalism yet again -- the very same college textbooks used in the United States sell for half price, or less, in England. One sophomore imported 30 biology books this fall and sold them outside his classroom for less than the campus-bookstore price, netting a $1,200 profit." Wait 'til they shuffle the problem sets.

Jason Scott writes "TiVo: You love it or you haven't met it. For those who have it (or are thinking of getting one), a new book is out about all the different ways to modify, increase capacity, or even program TiVos. Whether you want to just add a little capacity to your TiVo's drives or turn it into a full-blown home entertainment center hooked into your home LAN, Jeff Keegan has written a massive and all-encompassing book on this rewarding art." Read on for the rest of Jason's review. Hacking TiVo: The Expansion, Enhancement and Development Starter Kit author Jeff Keegan pages 500 publisher Wiley Publishing, Inc. rating 10 reviewer Jason Scott ISBN 0764543369 summary Everything from admining how cool TiVos are to turning them into your home entertainment server. Exhaustive, elaborate, and funny.

As a relatively early convert to the TiVo way of life, I always found it hard to describe to people who didn't have one why their lives could be changed by it. If I was lucky, I could get friends to visit and with a few short minutes of demonstration, I'd sold another one. If they were farther away, I just hoped they would stop by some day and I'd have another convert. Why was I so intent on this? Because if you watch TV, or even if you don't watch as much as you used to, TiVo can change your life completely. It frees you from the tyranny of watching shows when you're told to watch them, and then goes on to turn your entire television experience from one bombarded with ads and missing all the "good stuff" on scattered random channels, to a true symbiotic relationship where you sit down in front of the tube and every single moment is one filled with shows you want to watch about stuff you're interested in.

A lot of Slashdot readers know what I'm talking about, because they have a TiVo or other PVR in their home right now. So when I tell you that this book will take your TiVo to the next level, I hope you get as excited as I was after reading the dozens of tricks, programs, and hacks this book lists.

The opening chapter describes, in succinct but energetic fashion, why every person with a TV should have a TiVo. Keegan's description may fall towards the evangelical side of things, but he goes out of his way to explain why his feelings are so strong. In fact, this book has an interesting side-effect: converting those who don't own a TiVo. Just a quick browse through the first few chapters will have someone who's heard of TiVo but never used one chomping at the bit to get down to the store. To the TiVo army, this is a powerful munition indeed.

From there, it's a powerful spiral into chapter after chapter of modifications, starting with back doors in the code and moving into opening the TiVo's case (explained with lots of clear pictures), adding storage, and even working with the TiVo's OS (a variation of Linux) to turn it into a web-accessible site or to improve performance.

One inspiring chapter describes the author's experience at a baseball game, having his father go to get refreshments and missing some great plays, and the author pulling out his Palm Pilot with cellular modem to tell his TiVo over the web to record the game's highlights on the news. With that tantalizing trick presented, Keegan goes into the whole involved deal, everything from modifying the TiVo to creating the external server to feed the TiVo information.

As I said, the tricks come fast and furious: TiVo as a way to browse photo galleries. TiVo pulling down the current weather and presenting the radar maps. TiVo printing Caller ID information on the screen when someone calls. By the time you're done with the book, you'll be wondering what there is that you can't do with it. And that, to me, is the sign of a truly great instructional book.

A warning: If you want a neutral voice in the author, this isn't the book for you. Keegan's enthusiasm drips from many pages, written in the tone of the guy down the street with the new toy who simply has take you to the den and show you how cool it is, describing in greater and greater detail all the cool stuff he's discovered tinkering with it. The author's wife, newborn daughter, mother and father make appearances all throughout the book, including a particularly touching description of having his father design an assembly language program to manipulate an LED display. No, really, it's touching. I did a search for Jeff and information on him and I found a photo of him in this costume. Honestly, I'm speechless. The man has achieved what we call "full commitment."

By about halfway through the book it stops being an instruction manual and begins being a full-on reference book, giving you explicit instructions on programming in Tcl, mucking about in Linux, and generally being a hard-core warranty violator. One appendix is dedicated to being a Tcl reference list while another hits you up for some basic Linux training (to be able to work comfortably in the OS).

Keegan has also been kind enough to include a CD-ROM with pretty much all the programs and utilities needed to accomplish what's in his book. It's a telling personal trait that he apologizes for putting it all on a CD instead of enabling readers to go out and search for the programs themselves.

To say I learned things in this book is an amazing understatement. Just to know that some of these things are even possible with my TiVo guarantee how I'll be spending the next few hundred dollars, buying larger drives, getting a cache card, and wiring the machine for ethernet. And Yes, it tells you how to get the shows off of your TiVo onto your computer's hard drive.

When I ordered this book from Amazon, I found out it was an Amazon exclusive, so that's the only place to get it right now. On the other hand, I was able to get my copy in a very short time, so I'm fine with that ... but I hope that you can get it in other places in the future. Regardless, it was worth the money I paid for it, especially since Amazon had 30 percent off in some effort to push to product. Great for me; I'm glad this book came into my collection and I think any TiVo owner (or hopeful TiVo owner) will agree.

Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

bhoman writes "Salon has an interesting article/interview with the author of a forthcoming book, Black Box Voting, by Bev Harris, that looks at electronic voting machines, especially Diebold touchscreens. The story includes incriminating internal memos, cease and desist orders from Diebold, transcripts of an industry teleconference where Harris Miller of the ITAA brags of his lobbying experience, and documentation of a backdoor via an Access MDB with no password. This is for software currently being used in 37 states. "

Peter Wayner writes: "If you're looking for a quick way to test the difference between reading text online and reading it in a book, turn to Steal This Computer Book 3 by Wallace Wang, the third edition of a popular series that promises to tell you 'what they won't tell you about the Internet.' All of the information in the book can be gathered from Google for free, but the crisp writing, clean presentation and printed format make the book a good deal. It's possible to curl up in a chair out of WiFi range and cruise the best parts of the Internet without leaving a trail of cookies." Read on below for the rest of Peter's review -- it's free! Steal This Computer Book 3 author Wallace Wang pages 358 publisher No Starch Press rating 9 reviewer Peter Wayner ISBN 1593270003 summary An irreverant

The book is a travelog of many of the most interesting or inflammatory corners of the Internet. There are chapters on hacktivism, hate crime, con games, spam, phone phreaking and dozens of other topics. If someone's spent time flaming about it, banning it, subpoenaing it, or demonizing it, there's probably a section on it here. All of the sections come with screen shots and URLs for further digging.

I found reading the book to be an odd pleasure. There was no way to click on the sites or try any of the software without heading for a computer, but that didn't seem to matter. If anything, it was nice to skip over the links and put off heading down alternate paths until later. The more I experience books like this, the more I begin to wonder if there's much in the hyper-fragmented, postmodern view of a narrative built out of multiply forking paths. This book offers one fairly simple arc that carries us through the most talked about corners of the web and it does it fairly gracefully. That's a pleasure unto itself.

The book comes with a rebellious gloss and semiotic history. The title was stolen from Steal This Book a collection of anarchist schemes written by Abbie Hoffman in the 1960s. Despite the title, that book became a bestseller -- offering a glimpse of the longterm prospects for Hoffman's revolution. All of the prole sheep dutifully bought a book filled with bombmaking techniques that promises to show you where "exactly to place the dynamite that will destroy the walls."

Hoffman's book showed that people will buy something they value even when they're told to steal it. The prole sheep intuitively understand that books cost money to create. But maybe that was a different era, before the web existed. This website offers the text even though there are four editions for sale at Amazon. I wonder who holds the rights?

Wang's book is nowhere near as radical or as dangerous. Hoffman wrote sentences like "The purpose of part two is not to fuck the system, but destroy it." Wang generally avoids such antagonistic language and speaks generally about anti-social behavior in the third person: "When hackers use social engineering, they often masquerade as a consultant or temporary worker..."

Much of the book, in fact, is filled with techniques that are presented as tools for protecting your privacy and your personal information. The back cover asks, "Is your computer safe from computer viruses and malicious hackers?" It's only partially aimed at helping people do asocial things on the Net. Helping people protect themselves from the evil hordes is a large part of it. Given that identity theft is a booming business, this edition is practically an anti-crime book.

What does this mean for the this Internet revolution? Will the current file trading yippies overthrow the copyright system? Will file sharing actually become the norm? Or will all of the Napsterites follow the paths of Hoffman's proteges and grow up, have kids, move to the burbs, and start paying for their content? Well, they might if the content is as comfortable as this book in the hands while sitting in a La-Z-Boy recliner. No popup windows. No flash graphics. No registration required. Just pure content. Hmmm.

Peter Wayner is the author of books like Policing Online Games, Translucent Databases and Java RAMBO Manifesto. Please don't steal them. You can purchase Steal This Computer Book 3 from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

DrCarbonite writes "Andre' LaMothe is releasing a brand new game console, the XGAMESTATION which may fulfill the fantasies of Slashdot readers everywhere. 16-bit Motorola CPU with a graphics architecture "similar to the Commodore 64, Atari 800, and Apple II". Its an electronics kit being marketed as a game system that wants to be hacked/modded/rebuilt. It supports homebrew everything-- joystick adapters, displays, software, roms, the whole nine yards."

Well, one science journalist's opinion, anyway. Charles Seife writes for Science magazine and is the author of Alpha and Omega: The Search for the Beginning and End of the Universe. These are his answers to your questions, and they're very detailed, to the point where you may want to set aside more than a few minutes of quiet time to read and digest them. Q1) "Publishing hype" by BobTheLawyer (#6606631)

A1)I'm not embarrassed at all because it's not hype. Scientists now know how the universe will end. Of course, as with all things scientific, there's a big honking asterisk on the word "know," but before I get to that, let me explain why I feel justified in making such an arrogant statement.

We're in the middle of a scientific revolution, in the honest-to-god paradigm-shift sense. This revolution started in 1997 when two groups of astronomers, the High-Z Supernova Search Team and the Supernova Cosmology Project used the bright flashes of a particular type of dying star (a type-Ia supernova) to measure the expansion of the universe at different times in the past. Since then, a whole raft of astronomical observations -- of faint patterns in the afterglow of the big bang, of distributions of galaxies, of the composition of intergalactic clouds of gas, of distortions of light going around massive bodies -- have all forced cosmologists into a remarkable consensus about the composition of the universe and, yes, its fate.

Just to give you a little taste of what the difference in the state of knowledge was like: in 1997, if you asked an astronomer how old the universe is, you'd get an answer somewhere between 12 and 15 billion years. Now, you'll get an answer of 13.7 billion years, plus or minus about 100 million. That's a big jump in precision. Similarly, before 1997, nobody had a clue how the universe would end; now, cosmologists agree on its fate. Some of the details haven't been worked out (what an understatement!), but the gross picture of the ultimate fate of the cosmos seems to be pretty well established for the first time in history. And by the end of the decade, a lot of the details will be fleshed out.

The ongoing revolution isn't just astronomical; it's physical. A decade ago, nobody knew whether neutrinos have mass. (For those who aren't particle physicists, neutrinos are particles that so rarely interact with matter that they can easily pass through the Earth without noticing the big chunk of mass they've passed through. This property makes them exceedingly hard to study.) Now, neutrino physicists are in accord -- and they've concluded that neutrinos, collectively, weigh about as much as all the visible stars and galaxies in the universe combined. High-energy physicists are using an accelerator in Long Island to recreate the condition of the universe a few microseconds after the big bang. By next year, they will formally announce the creation of a new state of matter that existed only in the very, very early universe. (There are alreadystrong hints that they've succeeded.) And another particle accelerator under construction in Geneva is very likely going to discover the particle responsible for exotic dark matter. (More on this shortly.)

All these experiments, all these observations, are pointing in exactly the same direction; they reveal the composition of the universe and its fate. But as with any good scientific revolution, such as relativity or quantum mechanics, it generates more questions than it answers. Scientists now know how the universe will end, but that understanding comes at the cost of a new mystery in physics.

As to the asterisk on the word "know," scientists are acutely aware that their theories are subject to revision. But at the same time, they have good reasons for being confident about their theories -- and they are more confident about some theories than about others. The new cosmological picture that's emerged has a darn high confidence rating; extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof, and the scientific world wouldn't accept the ideas of dark matter, much less dark energy, if there weren't a number of independent lines of evidence that forced scientists to make that conclusion. And while they're not confident about many of the details of the cosmos and the mechanisms that shape it, they are pretty sure that the overall picture is correct. (More on this coming, too.)

Q2) [Almost] Serious question! by Noryungi (#6606694)

and

Q3) Why does the rate of expansion change? by Anonymous Coward (#6606745)

A2,3) The universe will end in... umm... you really want me to give away the ending to my book?

Actually, I reveal the answer in chapter four, because the understanding of the fate of the universe is just the beginning of the current cosmological revolution. So it's not a spoiler to say...

-- drum roll -- the universe will die a heat death, or "Dark & Cold" by your terminology.

In a big bang universe governed by the laws of general relativity, there are two possibilities. (Actually, there are more than two, but all the cases boil down to two real outcomes.) Big crunch or heat death, fire or ice.

The fate of the universe depends on how the universe expands. In general, things that expand cool down and things that are compressed heat up. (This is what causes a propane container to feel so cold after a barbecue -- all the gas that expanded.) After the big bang the universe was extremely hot and was seething with energy. As it expanded, it cooled; free-roaming quarks condensed into protons and neutrons, and wound up as hydrogen, helium, and a handful of other light elements and isotopes. About 400,000 years after the big bang, the universe cooled enough so that the electrons could combine with the nuclei and form neutral atoms. Now, about 14 billion years later, the universe is a pretty cool place.

The expansion of the universe is like a cannonball shot into the air. As the cannonball flies ever higher, the force of gravity tries to drag it back to earth, reducing its upward velocity and slowing it down as it zooms upward. If gravity is very strong, then the cannonball rapidly loses its speed and quickly comes crashing back to the ground. On the other hand, if gravity is very weak, then the cannonball might escape the pull of the earth entirely and zoom away into outer space.

Similarly, the big bang gave the universe an initial cannonshot of expansion. If the mutual gravitational attraction of the objects in the universe is very strong (if there's a lot of matter in the universe) the expansion will slow down, halt, and eventually reverse itself. After the cooling phase of expansion, the universe will begin to swallow itself, getting smaller and smaller each day. This will make it heat up. The skies will get brighter and brighter as galaxies and stars get closer and closer together, and eventually, the universe will become a bath of radiation once more. Electrons will separate from atoms, atoms and then protons and neutrons will shiver into their components, and the universe will collapse in a "big crunch," a reverse big bang. The cosmos will die a death by fire.

On the other hand, if there's not much matter in the universe, then the expansion of the universe will continue forever. The expansion will slow down, but it will never halt and never reverse itself. The universe continues to cool down, and for a long time, space will look pretty much as it does now. Stars will be born and die, and galaxies will age. The night sky would get darker and darker as distant objects get too dim to view, and eventually, as the hydrogen in the universe is consumed, stars and galaxies will begin to wink out. Many billions of years hence, the universe will be a lifeless soup of dim light and dead matter. It will be a death by ice.

In 1997 and 1998, the two supernova teams used the brightness of distant supernovae to measure the rate of expansion at different times in the past. (Because the speed of light is finite, looking into the distance is the same as looking into the past. This causes no end of tense problems when writing a book about cosmology.) What they found was absolutely gobsmacking. Not only was the universe's expansion not slowing down very much -- it was speeding up! The cannonball was zooming into the air faster and faster as if it were propelled by some sort of weird antigravity force. Not only was the cannonball going to escape, it is so OUTTA HERE! This means a death by ice.

Yegads -- an antigravity force. This was a really hard thing for scientists (and probably you) to accept. But there's a number of different lines of evidence that support the idea, and in the book I go through those lines of evidence in great detail. I'll have to settle for a brief summary here. In 2000, a balloon experiment known as Boomerang took very detailed pictures of the ubiquitous afterglow of the big bang, the cosmic microwave background (CMB). This afterglow has hot and cold spots in it, and for years, scientists have been making very, very detailed predictions about the size and distribution of those spots. The results of the Boomerang experiment and the DASI and WMAP experiments matched those predictions incredibly well, giving scientists great confidence in the underlying theory. It also allowed them to figure out the amount of matter and energy in the universe, and 73% of the "stuff" in the cosmos was dark energy, this antigravity force.

There are a number of other lines of evidence, too; the current distribution of galaxies, for example, implies the presence of an antigravity force, and just last month, scientists made a very nice measurement of something known as the late integrated Sachs-Wolfe effect. This effect can't occur unless you have something like dark energy counteracting gravity's pull.

Unfortunately, a fuller exposition requires a lot more writing -- it takes up several chapters in my book. (Shameless plug). But in summary, there's a number of independent observations that all point to the existence of a dark energy. Furthermore, the theories underlying the idea have made very specific predictions that have been verified with incredible precision. It's extraordinary stuff, but no matter how scientists look at it, they're forced by extraordinary evidence to make the same conclusion.

Yes, it's true that scientists don't know the mechanism of dark energy (though they're not entirely at sea) but there's little doubt that the cannonball is zooming into space faster and faster. They don't know precisely why, but the universe is being pushed toward its icy death by an antigravity force. Scientists are watching it happen.

And you don't need to wait billions of years to know the outcome -- you don't need to observe something directly to conclude that it's going to happen. The planet Pluto was discovered in 1930. So why don't people object to the statement that it takes about 250 years to complete an orbit? Just as you don't have to wait until 2180 to confirm the conclusions of Newtonian dynamics, you don't need to witness the end of the universe to be able to figure out its fate or validate the theory that leads you to that prediction.

Q4) Dark Matter by notcreative (#6606772)

A4) You are correct; the nature and location of dark matter are crucial puzzles in modern cosmology, but I think that the answers will be pretty much in hand by the end of the decade.

I've already mentioned results (most notably WMAP) that reveal the amount of "stuff" in the universe, and 73% of it is dark energy. The rest is matter. But the grand total of the matter locked up in visible stars is a mere 0.5% of the stuff in the universe. What is the other 26.5%? That's dark matter, and, in fact, there are two different types.

Scientists have known for decades that most of the matter in the universe is invisible to telescopes. In the 1960s, Vera Rubin measured the motion of stars wheeling around the center of the Andromeda galaxy and concluded that there had to be a lot more matter pulling on those stars than could be seen.

Despite what some contrarians say, dark matter isn't dogma; viable alternatives, like Moti Milgrom's MOND are taken seriously, if not accepted. Unfortunately, all of the alternatives, including MOND, fail in crucial ways. Besides, you can see dark matter, both directly and indirectly. The MACHO and OGLE projects see the twinkle of stars caused by a passing chunk of dark matter, and they can see the distortion of light caused by a huge amount of unseen mass sitting on the fabric of spacetime. (Distant galaxies are stretched into arcs around this gravitational lens.) This is allowing scientists to figure out just where dark matter resides. But at the same time, a number of observations lead scientists to conclude that the minority of the matter (dark or light) in the universe is ordinary, atomic matter -- the stuff of stars, planets, and people. Again, it will take too long to describe all the lines of evidence, but one powerful way of measuring the number of atoms in the universe is to look at the proportion of hydrogen to deuterium, helium, and lithium in primordial gas clouds. In the first three minutes of the universe, atoms were fusing, just as they do in a hydrogen bomb. The universe was a giant pressure cooker, turning protons and neutrons into heavier elements. If there are a lot of atoms, then there is a lot of fusion and a lot of heavy elements made; if there are not very many atoms, then the universe winds up being almost entirely hydrogen. By looking at the ratios of heavy elements to light elements, scientists concluded that atomic matter makes up about 4% of the "stuff" in the universe -- which is precisely what other measurements, like the CMB ones -- imply, too.

So, 27% of the stuff in the universe is matter: 4% "atomic" matter, leaving 23% to be made of "exotic" matter, stuff that's not made of atoms. I've already described some of that exotic matter; neutrinos make up about 0.5% of the stuff in the universe, about the same as the visible matter in the universe. What's the remainder?

That's the big open question, but one that I'd wager will be solved by the end of the decade. There are very good reasons -- particle physics ones, rather than cosmological ones -- for believing that the main constituent of dark matter is a proposed particle known as the LSP. If it is, then the LHC accelerator in Geneva will find it. If not, then the LSP almost certainly doesn't exist and the puzzle will be compounded -- but I think that scientists are extremely optimistic. Again, there's lots more detail in the book about the justification for this.

Q5) variable constants by Cally (#6607000)

A5) The point's well taken, and I'll get to it after a few remarks.

First, you're right in that the supernovae serve much the same purpose as Cepheid variable stars do -- they're both objects of known brightness, or "standard candles," that allow astronomers to make a precise measurement of the distance to a faraway galaxy. However, they are not the same thing. Cepheids are stars that pulsate and the rate of that pulsation reveals its intrinsic brightness. They're what Hubble used to spot the expansion of the universe in the 1920s, but they're relatively dim and impossible to find in very distant galaxies. Type-Ia supernovae are standard candles that are much, much brighter than Cepheids, and so can be seen halfway across the universe. (And as you note, since distant supernovae mean ancient supernovae, they reveal the expansion rate of the universe billions of years ago.)

Second, the time-varying speed of light (or more precisely, the time-varying fine structure constant) is a controversial idea. The scientists that made the observation in question are pretty solid and they're taken seriously. However, my impression is that mainstream thinking is that the results are due to a systematic error. That aside, the effect, even if real, is very small, and it has nothing to do with interpreting the data from standard candles. The interpretation there is quite well established; there's little question that scientists are seeing an expansion of the universe;. Alternative theories, like tired light, fail in countless ways and scientists have even seen the relativistic time dilation caused by the motion of the distant object.

But, yes, it's natural for a layperson to conclude that the concordance cosmological model is looking increasingly kludge-y, and you're naturally led to wonder whether scientists are trying to prop up a failing model with the equivalent of epicycles or aether. I don't think this is the case for a few reasons.

For one thing, the theory isn't really getting added to and made more complex; it's getting subtracted from and being made more simple. This seems counterintuitive, but it comes from the fact that modern big bang theory is really a class of theories, rather than one set-in-stone dictum about the way the universe is. All these theories agree on the basic physics about the manner of the universe's birth, the forces that drive the universe, and the physics behind them; the difference between the theories are the values of a handful of parameters that are not predicted by the theory. These parameters are inputs rather than outputs, and by pinning down the values of these inputs, the acceptable class of theories gets narrower and narrower.

Dark energy is one of these inputs. Although nobody took it seriously before 1998 -- everyone thought that the value of the parameter in question was zero -- it was lurking there nonetheless. It turns out that this parameter is not only non-zero, it's really big, much to everyone's surprise. But this doesn't add complexity to the model, especially since other parameters, such as the "curvature" of the universe as a whole, which many physicists thought would be non-trivial, turn out not to be important after all. (In other words, the universe seems to be slate flat, rather than saddle-shaped or sphere-like.)

So, from a mathematical viewpoint, the model is no more complex than it was in 1997, and is, in fact, significantly leaner. But what about from a physical viewpoint? Dark matter and dark energy seem to fly in the face of Occam. But here, too, the increase in complexity is much less than it appears. Long before this cosmological revolution, astronomers knew that dark matter had to exist; more recently, they've begun to see it. Even without worrying about cosmological questions, astrophysicists had accepted the existence of dark matter. Cosmological measurements like WMAP showed that these astrophysicists were right -- it was an independent confirmation that dark energy exists and that it comes in two forms, something that other astronomers had concluded a while ago.

Dark energy, on the other hand, has more claim to being a "hack" to the theory. It really is something new and unexpected (even though it was always a mathematical possibility, nobody in the physics world suspected it actually existed.) Nevertheless, the groundwork was already there, and modern big bang theory implicitly requires the existence of a form of dark energy in the very early universe. And since the 1930s, scientists knew that even the deepest vacuum is full of energy and can exert pressure (something known as the Casimir effect, which I describe in this book and in my previous book, Zero: The Biography of a Dangerous Idea). Thus, the idea of dark energy wasn't completely alien to physics before 1997, and in some sense, it was a necessary component.

Yes, it's possible that scientists are looking at the cosmos in the wrong way, and somebody will establish a simpler, more elegant theory that takes all these threads and weaves them together. (More on this shortly.) But at the moment, far from having a kludged-up theory, cosmologists have a leaner (if weirder) theory than ever before -- one that makes very precise predictions that are getting verified with stunning accuracy. I think this argues for increased confidence in the theory rather than for increased fear that it's falling apart.

Q6) Universe's container by bios10h (#6606748)

A6) It freaks a lot of people out. There's a lot of philosophical problems with having an infinite universe -- for example, if the universe is truly infinite, and if, as scientists believe, the number of quantum states of a finite volume is finite, then it's hard to escape the conclusion that, some great distance away, there's a bizarro-you on bizarro-earth reading bizarro-Slashdot. On the other hand, there's no positive evidence that I can think of that the universe is truly infinite; it's just the sparest conclusion in a mathematical sense, if not a philosophical sense.

But an infinite universe is not a foregone conclusion. Earlier this year, Max Tegmark at the University of Pennsylvania published an intriguing paper that looked at slight anomalies in the WMAP data that seem to imply that the universe is not only finite, but shaped like a donut. Nobody takes the idea terribly seriously, not even the author, because there are other statistical tests that seem to rule the donut-shaped universe out. But it's the sort of thing that people are looking at very closely.

Whether it's finite or infinite, in a mathematical sense, there's really no need for the universe to be "in" anything -- there are models where our universe is embedded in a higher-dimensional space, but there are models where it isn't. Philosophically, though, I don't see any advantage to embedding the universe in something bigger -- as you say, it just punts the problem forward. (Who, then, will contain the containers?)

It's one of those things that is hard to get comfortable with -- and even when you accept it, it sometimes can cause pangs of uncertainty. Quantum mechanics does this, too... it's just something that's hard to wrap your head around. Take solace in the fact that it's hard for everyone else, too.

Q7) How ultimate is the end of the universe? by Lane.exe (#6606766)

A7) If there were a collapse-type universe, yes, there could be a reboot and a new big bang. (And if Microsoft built the universe, a reboot would be coming sooner rather than later. *duck*)

In fact, the theory behind the cosmic microwave background stemmed from calculations to see whether this was possible. Remember the expansion-cooling/contraction-heating bit I mentioned a while ago? A physicist at Princeton was trying to figure out whether matter would break apart into its constituents in a collapsing universe, so he looked at how the universe heated up as it compressed. He then realized that his calculations worked equally well in reverse -- the young expanding universe was very hot but cooling -- and it had to have an afterglow: the CMB.

There are restrictions on this rebirth argument, though. For one thing, the fact that the universe will expand forever prevents a big crunch in our future, so we're at the end of the line if such a line existed. And in 2001, Alan Guth proved a mathematical theorem that shows that bang/crunch/bang universes can't have an infinite history; they must have started some finite time in the past. (Though there are a few ways around the theorem if you reject a few assumptions.) So yes, it's possible, but there is no reason to believe it actually happened, and there are very good reasons for thinking it won't happen in the future.

Q8) comparable ramifications? by sstory (#6606658)

A8) I'm not going to give the usual B.S. answers about spinoffs (though there are some). And I'm not going to evade the question by saying that genomics hasn't yielded any transformation, because the potential is certainly there. But I will answer this question obliquely.

If I asked you, "Quick! What's the most important scientific achievement of the 20th century?" how would you respond?

You would probably answer relativity or quantum mechanics, or perhaps the Apollo landings. Probably some would say the atom bomb. I suspect that only a handful of people would mention the computer, and even fewer people would say penicillin. (Am I right?)

Science has two faces -- it can transform society (for better or worse), and it can advance human knowledge. The two are not inextricably bound, though they often come together.

Relativity was a profound shift in our understanding of the way the universe works, but you have to look pretty hard to see a direct effect on our lives. Conversely, penicillin wasn't a central advance in understanding biological systems, but it affected all of us -- I suspect many people here on Slashdot wouldn't be alive today without penicillin and its descendants.

For me, though, relativity is a greater scientific triumph than penicillin -- even though penicillin is probably much more important to us. It altered our view of the universe and gave us a greater understanding of the fundamental laws of the universe -- it was a philosophical advance as much as it was a technical one. That's why we seem to admire Einstein more than Fleming and Newton more than Jenner.

The present cosmological revolution won't change our lives dramatically; heck, a good spam filter would probably have more direct effect on our quality of life. But at the same time, it will finally answer some of the most ancient questions of humanity -- where did the universe come from and how will it end -- and when it ends, we will have a firm grasp of the answer of the latter if not the former. It will be a towering intellectual achievement, and I think that is what will set it apart from even the human genome project.

Q9) What is the next paradigm shift? by geeber (#6606890)

A9) I disagree with the idea that there's no paradigm shifts left -- indeed, I think we're in the middle of one now. I think that it will be associated with one in the Standard Model of particle physics that will begin before the end of the decade.

It's hard to say where future paradigm shifts lie, but there are lots and lots of outstanding questions in science, some of which are incredibly basic, yet totally out of scientists' reach. For example, neurologists have a very good idea about how individual neurons work -- how they connect and communicate. But when it comes to explaining how a large sloppy hunk of neurons becomes a conscious entity, they're completely at sea. I don't think there's even a good definition of consciousness, which is crucial if you're going to study it seriously. Even more basic -- scientists are struggling to define what life is. There's a heck of a lot more work to do, and plenty of room for paradigm shifts.

Speaking of paradigm shifts, I'd like to take a bit of issue with the term (which I've used myself a number of times in the responses to these questions.)

For those who don't know, the idea of a "paradigm shift" comes from Thomas Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a seminal work in history of science. While I think that Kuhn's idea of a paradigm shift has a lot of merit -- models and philosophies do change suddenly and dramatically in the face of mounting conflicting evidence and despite resistance -- I think the term itself is misleading. It implies the complete abandonment of one idea and acceptance of a replacement.

In my view, this is not the way modern science works -- I think that science is cumulative. Each model extends and corrects the previous one, and while there might be a dramatic shift philosophically, there is almost never a dramatic shift physically. Relativity, for example, made a profound change in the way we think about time and space and gravity, yet the functional difference between Newton and Einstein is pretty small. All these complicated tensor equations are approximately equal to Newton's laws in the vast, vast majority of cases -- it's only under conditions of extreme gravity, extreme speed, extreme energy, or extreme time that relativistic predictions diverge from Newton's. Similarly with quantum mechanics.

While I think that relativity and quantum mechanics are paradigm shifts, they're not rejections of the Newtonian picture as much as they are extensions. The paradigm shift can be huge philosophically, but its effects tend to be small in magnitude. And with these small corrections, scientists extend the applicability of their model of the universe -- they can explain the orbit of Mercury or the photoelectric effect -- and in the cases where Newton's laws were strong, these models boil down to Newton's laws.

If I remember my Kuhn correctly, he explicitly rejected the idea of cumulative science; he really saw each model getting completely replaced by its successor, rather than as an extension -- and this leads, at least in my view, to the excesses of postmodernism.

I think that this issue goes to the heart of the questions about how scientists can be sure about the end of the universe if their models can be replaced at any time. To that I'd argue that, yes, all models are provisional, but even with "paradigm shifts" models are usually extended rather than replaced. The central findings of the previous model still hold with good accuracy in most cases, even if the philosophical underpinnings are badly shaken. Maybe scientists are missing some crucial understanding that will simplify the way we look at the universe -- and scientists are seriously pondering alternate models to things as widely accepted as the inflationary big bang -- but even if such a shift occurs, it probably won't invalidate today's discoveries.

Q10) What will it mean? by boatboy (#6607285)

A10) One thing's certain. If I knew the answers, I'd be even more insufferable than I am now.

Seriously, I'm not sure that knowing the answers would have a profound moral and sociological effect. While I think that asking and answering big questions is a hallmark of a prospering society, a society doesn't necessarily draw strength or stability from its intellectual curiosity. (For example, Athenian democracy lasted only about 80 years if I remember right.) Even the most profound philosophical ideas can wind up having little real effect on the everyday functioning of a civilization -- for example, I think that Godel's incompleteness theorem hasn't changed society in the slightest.

As for the next big question, I think there are some in biology: what is life? What is consciousness? How did life arise? Are we alone in the universe? In physics, I think there are profound questions yet to be answered in a realm that I'd describe as "information theory" in the broadest sense -- what's really going on in a black hole? What makes quantum mechanics so weird? And I think that answering the question about the true nature of dark energy will probably have to await a future cosmological revolution. But one of the wonderful things about science is that you don't really know what big questions are within your grasp until you begin to grasp them. We'll know the next revolution when it appears.

Editor's note: Due to long answer lengths, we linked to the questions instead of running them directly here in order to keep this page from getting too large. This was an experiment. If you have comments or questions about Slashdot interview formatting, please email Roblimo.

Berend de Boer asks: "To celebrate the upcoming encounter of The Mars Kind, I like to watch a DVD about Mars with my kids. Is there something worthwhile people can recommend? It should be suitable for younger kids (max 10), so Total Recall 2070 is out the question. It does not necessarily have to be an action film...something educational will be fine as well."

objectboy writes with a review of Chris Fehily's SQL: Visual QuickStart Guide, writing "This book teaches ANSI SQL-92 programming to database beginners and intermediates. The publisher, Peachpit Press, publishes mostly end-user and novice titles that usually go unnoticed by professional programmers. Its Perl and PHP books, for example, are of little practical or tutorial use to an experienced developer. In fact, I noticed this SQL book only because a junior developer was using it for a course. The book's table of contents, index, and a sample chapter are posted on Amazon.com. The book's official web site contains errata and other information." Objectboy's review continues below. SQL: Visual QuickStart Guide author Chris Fehily pages 424 publisher Peachpit Press rating 9/10 reviewer objectboy ISBN 0321118030 summary A lucid SQL tutorial and professional reference

What this book does right: The myth that it's more important for a programming book to be technically accurate than well written endures even though the opposite situation is true: A lucid explanation of a difficult concept or clever algorithm is more valuable than a bug-free implementation of same.

Consider Ken Henderson's The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL , a book full of useful examples but so marred by the author's bloated style and disrespect for the language that I cringe every time I'm forced to read the text rather than simply lift a code snippet. Henderson even goes so far as to include an introductory section, titled "On Formality," about how he is going to split infinitives (even though their syntax is a burden for the brain to parse) and how he is going to use "data" in the singular sense (even though doing so can cause confusion) and how he considers "record," "row", and "tuple" to be interchangeable terms (even though they're not) and on and on. Readers would be aghast to find such self-exculpatory nonsense in the pages of Donald Knuth or Patrick Henry Winston. As for SQL: Visual QuickStart Guide, the author, a statistical programmer, presents each topic with a mathematician's sense of restraint and order. I've found few typos, no technical errors, and consistent use of technical terms.

Almost every aspect of SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, ALTER, and DROP is covered. What distinguishes this book is that every ANSI SQL statement -- and there are hundreds of examples -- was tested on six separate DBMSes: Microsoft Access 2002, Microsoft SQL Server 2000, MySQL 4.0, PostgreSQL 7.1, Oracle 8i, and Oracle 9i (8i and 9i differ considerably in SQL-92 compliance). The examples in each section increase in depth and complexity, so you can stop reading once you've learned what you need to know. When an ANSI SQL statement doesn't work as-is on a particular DBMS, the author shows you how to fix it or offers workarounds (which is particularly useful for MySQL, whose adherence to the SQL standard is poor). These DBMS-specific fixes are given as separate "DBMS Tips" apart from the main body of text, so they don't interfere with the conceptual flow. This organization is especially useful for consultants who have difficulty keeping track of how each implementation deviates from the ANSI standard, and is superior to the alphabetical, segregated approach of O'Reilly's SQL in a Nutshell.

This book was shoehorned into the publisher's Visual QuickStart format, which, as I implied earlier, doesn't work well for procedural languages, but does work for a declarative language like SQL. A two-column layout separates examples from explanatory text. Red type highlights the relevant portions of code and results. The book is extensively cross-referenced and has an 18-page index. This layout also makes the book a good quick reference for experienced programmers. Almost all the examples use a single, sample database (so there's no need to memorize multiple schemas). The code listings and sample database are available for download.

The derivative nature of programming books makes it difficult to determine whether the author truly has mastered the material. Writing a book is a difficult task (perhaps even harder than programming) but, at the risk of exaggerating my point, I suspect that any determined, organized, and competent programmer could write any O'Reilly Nutshell book by paraphrasing existing materials. But if an author establishes his credentials early, the reader gains a sense of trust that remains throughout the entire book. In the introduction to this book, the author avoids an error that almost every other SQL-book author commits: that SQL stands for structured query language. According to ANSI (the only legitimate arbiter here), it stands for S-Q-L and nothing more. Fehily even offers an amusing explanation of why structured query language is the worst possible description of SQL. Throughout the book, the author also scatters bits of practical advice (job candidates are wise to say my-es-kyu-el, not my-sequel), beginner-friendly insights ("Although SELECT is powerful, it's not dangerous: You can't use it add, change, or delete data or database objects."), and advanced topics (optimization, concurrency control, logical data independence). It is these asides and respect for basic research, rather than swaths of expository text, that lend authority.

This book describes the effects of nulls in almost every aspect of SQL, including the interpretation of null-contaminated query results. You can no more be a competent SQL programmer without understanding nulls than you can be a competent LISP programmer without understanding recursion. Particularly useful are the discussion of three-value logic (true/false/unknown) and an algebraic derivation of how a null can cause a subquery to return an empty result unexpectedly (which has bitten me more than once).

As a wizened developer weary of hand-holding users and junior programmers through routine queries, I've found it mollifying to give away copies of this book (it's cheap) to reduce my interrupt stack.

What's Missing: Some missing items that I would have found useful:

• A glossary
• A quick syntax reference
• A chapter about statistics
• A chapter about advanced SQL "tricks"
• DB2 coverage
• Coverage of security commands (GRANT/REVOKE)
• An expanded query-optimization discussion
• Improved normalization examples
• A little more mathematical rigor in the set-theory discussion

You can purchase SQL: Visual QuickStart Guide from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

canuck asks: "I am currently a university student and have a major problem: being able to simply sit down and get work done. I can set aside a day to work, whether it is homework or contract work, and I will be lucky to have an hour done before dinner time. The only time I can actually get solid work done seems to be after midnight under a lot of pressure (ie. a deadline the next day). This has led to too many 5 a.m. nights and turning down too many invitations to go out only to stay in and accomplish nothing. I have stopped playing games, stopped watching TV, tried reading the Seven Habits book, and am currently seeing what classical music does for me. I don't think I have ADHD, and I am not sure what else to try. If it is computer work, the web is always a click away, and I can always escape to my imagination. I know many of you will have had the same problem. Can anyone please give advice on how to overcome this problem, be it a little trick, medication, or anything else?"

emmastory writes "The New York Times is running a story (free registration required) about a new development at Amazon - they plan to assemble "a searchable online archive with the texts of tens of thousands of books of nonfiction." Users would only be able to read a certain portion of the text from any one book, but it sounds promising nonetheless. The Times article suggests that this is part of a larger strategy to compete with Google and Yahoo by making Amazon an authoritative source of information on everything book-related."

BandwidthHog writes "Marriage counselor and ethics author codifies human virtues and vices, then patents it as Ethical AI. Seems vague, but he's got high hopes: 'This could be a big money-making operation for someone who wants to develop it,' and 'The patent shows someone who has knowledge of the A.I. field how to make the invention.'" I can't wait for the kinder, gentler vending machine.

An anonymous reader writes "There's a new BusinessWeek article looking at some of the cool hacks coming out of Amazon's open API and XML feed policy. Some nifty stuff - 27,000 developers have apparently signed up to build hacks on Amazon data. It seems '..most are only part-timers and hobbyists, but a growing number are serious programmers who seek to make a living selling products based on the data Amazon is offering on a silver platter.'"

emmastory writes "Mac OS X Unleashed is not a pocket guide. It's more of a massive tome than anything else - at over 1500 pages, it's probably the heaviest technical book I own. (And that's including Deitel & Deitel's C: How to Program.) Since Mac OS X Unleashed describes itself as 'a complete guide and reference for Mac OS users,' my biggest question when approaching the book was whether this is in fact the case. It seems like if you're going to shell out for an OS X book of this size and price, then it should ideally be the only OS X book you'll have to buy." Mac OS X Unleashed (2nd Edition) author John Ray, William C. Ray pages 1560 publisher Sams rating 7/10 reviewer Emma Story ISBN 0672324652 summary A massive book that aims to be a complete OS X reference

What I Liked
There's no shortage of good things about Unleashed, but the best is probably that the authors assume, for the most part,that you already know how to use your computer. Although there are many good books out there for those new to Macs, this is not one of them and does not try to be. That means that if you've already achieved a basic working knowledge of Mac OS, there's still well over a thousand pages of information intended especially for you. A line from another review of Unleashed (posted anonymously on Amazon) that rang particularly true after reading the book: "If you're looking for a book that says 'this is called a mouse' and tells you where to find iTunes in order to click on it, or drops the bombshell that command-p will print in many applications, you don't need this volume, but if you want to get your hands dirty, it's an excellent resource."

However, I can understand that many people do want the basics in an OS X book. In fact, another Amazon reviewer makes this very point: "Coverage of the iApps is far less than it should be, and there isn't enough information for a novice user like myself. I thought the author spent far too much time on the UNIX and Terminal side of Jaguar and not enough on the real-world tips that I've found in other books." Still, I personally don't really see that as a problem. There are plenty of real-world tips as long as your real world involves a shell, and if there's one thing I've never needed a book for, it's the iApps. In fact, I've always found it irritating that other OS X books spend so much time on them. But that's me, and I'm not everyone.

There were several sections of the book that surprised me, including the chapter on web programming. It makes sense, though - the book is intended to "unleash" OS X, after all, and OS X does come with an Apache installation (even if System Preferences calls it Personal Web Sharing). Given that every OS X box has a webserver, it makes sense that many OS X users would want to know more about related topics. In fact, the chapters that focus on system and network administration comprise a pretty thorough introduction to the BSD side of OS X, and were fairly impressive. These were my favorite sections of the book, probably because they're topics rarely dealt with - or at least rarely dealt with well - in Mac books.

What I Didn't Like
The book suffers from some minor issues typical of most massive technical volumes - it's informative, but also dry, dense, and not terribly readable. Also, while I appreciate the depth and scope of the book, it is a little unwieldy. This isn't something you'll be reading in bed or on the subway. It's not a cheap book, either - its list price is $50. These problems are neither hugely important nor terribly surprising, but they're also not inevitable - reference texts can be thorough without being dull, it's just that this one happens to be both.

Probably the only other real complaint I have with the book is that at times it seems as though it can't decide who its audience is. As I mentioned above, one of the things I liked about Unleashed was that most of the book seems firmly aimed at the intermediate to experienced user. And yet if that's the case, then the chapters that cover things like Desktop Accessories (Calculator, Clock, Key Caps) seem out of place. It doesn't seem like the introductory material offered in the book would really be enough to serve as a tutorial for an absolute beginner (as evidenced by complaints like the one I quoted earlier), but at the same time it's difficult to figure out who else would need it. However, I'm not suggesting they skimped on advanced topics to squeeze in inappropriate Clock coverage - if there's one thing this book has, it's plenty of everything.

The Bottom line
I believe that Unleashed does live up to its title, and does a good job in the process. It's not an introduction to OS X - it's about getting more out of your system after you've already learned the basics. It doesn't (usually) try to be a beginner's book, but a quick-learning novice would probably do fine with it, and any moderately experienced Mac user will probably find that it serves his or her purposes effectively and efficiently. If given the choice (and funding), I'd probably still go with a couple different books, but I think Unleashed has in fact reached its goal of being a complete guide to OS X. You could do just fine with only this book, and at $50 it may be cheaper than buying a couple smaller books separately.

And Furthermore
Other reviews and sources of information on the book:

• Review at macosxhints (from whence another Mac book, incidentally)
• Review at osnews.com
• Review at mymac.com
• Epinions page for the book, which as it turns out isn't all that useful
• Amazon's page for the book, including many customer reviews

You can purchase the Mac OS X Unleashed from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

honestpuck writes "Many years ago I learnt my AppleScript skills from a book by a gentleman by the name of Danny Goodman and I was happy to find him tackling the subject of dynamic HTML in "Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference". Indeed this is the second edition and seems supremely up to date." Read on for the rest of honestpuck's review. Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference (2nd Ed.) author Danny Goodman pages 1343 publisher O'Reilly rating 9 reviewer Tony Williams ISBN 0596003161 summary Truly definitive reference for a huge topic

Goodman has tackled a complex subject. With changing standards and even quicker changing browser compatibility it can be a nightmare trying to get a dynamic web site working across disparate browsers and operating systems. A guide that tells you exact syntax and exact compatibility can be invaluable, but is only as good as the research behind it, an area where I cannot fault Goodman.

This volume covers XHTML, CSS and DOM with a large smidgeon of JavaScript. It's not an easy book to get into and consume in large chunks as it does little hand holding but as I was prepared to knuckle down and work at the topics (with much help from various web sites such as CSS Zen Garden) I found it perfect for me. Goodman has recently released JavaScript & DHTML Cookbook which I have found to be a marvelous volume to assist the process of understanding these technologies, though I am still looking for a good, up to date tutorial on CSS (recommendations welcome).

The target audience would be best summed up as those who have done a fair amount of HTML hand coding and some work in dynamic HTML. The book also adds that you should have "the basics of client-side scripting in JavaScript" and I would agree, when I first acquired this book my JavaScript skills were exceptionally primitive (mainly at the 'plug in example' stage) and found the latter sections of this book heavy going and not much help; now that I am a better JavaScript programmer I find these parts much easier to understand and use.

The book is divided into four parts, 'Applying Dynamic HTML,' 'Dynamic HTML Reference,' 'Cross References,' and 'Appendixes'. I found the first part particularly helpful when converting my old site across to a more dynamic CSS-based site as it helps with various strategies for making sure your content works across browsers and various methods for making sure that visitors with older browsers and search engines can still retrieve valid pages. Goodman's approach of increasing complexity through this part also suited a movement from a straight HTML site to one using XHTML and CSS. This is also where Goodman's writing can shine: it's an excellent guide to all the technologies and acronym soup. The appendices are marvelous, from 'A,' a list of colour names with their RGB value, through a list of character entities to a 50-page list of all HTML tags, their attributes and if they are supported in the two HTML 4 and three XHTML 1 standards.

The reference parts are well structured with extensive notes on browser support and which particular standard (DOM 1, DOM 2, CSS 1, CSS 2, or none) the tag or attribute comes from. For example, in the DOM section the reference gives you the object name, which versions of Navigator and Explorer support it, the DOM version (if any), a short explanation, then an object reference example, list of properties, methods and event handlers. For each of the properties it gives an example, the type and if it is read-only or read/write. For methods it gives the return value and parameters. This sort of attention to fine detail is taken throughout the book. You end up with a book 1343 pages long and a 51 page index. Goodman mentions in his preface that the book now encompasses 'more than 15,000 unique instances of properties, methods and event handlers,' a figure I'd believe.

O'Reilly have their usual page for this book that includes a sample chapter in PDF, the Index, Table of Contents and an Errata page. There are few Errata and only one in the code examples. Speaking of examples, you can download the complete set of code examples from the book.

There is also a page at O'Reilly for the author, Danny Goodman with links to some excellent articles and book excerpts on dynamic HTML and JavaScript.

I found this a hard book to review, as are most references. The questions I asked were: one, Does the book cover all the material?; two, Is it correct?; three, Is it easy to find the entry you want? and four, Are the entries laid out in an easy to understand manner? In these criteria this volume rates well, with the added bonus of some good material in the first section for understanding the nuances of dynamic HTML in a multiple browser, multiple operating system world.

If you are doing a lot of work in dynamic HTML then this book is probably an essential. While I don't consult it every time I start working on HTML when I run into trouble it is the first place I turn to make sure my syntax and browser compatibility are straight. This book ain't cheap, and it ain't small but I'd recommend it for your desk if you're working with web sites.

You can purchase the Dynamic HTML: The Definitive Reference (2nd Ed.) from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

countach writes "Amazon are taking orders for a new Palm OS Wrist Watch. It has an infra-red port, touch screen, back-light, stylus and 2MB of RAM. Price is $US 295.00." Because sometimes you don't look nerdy enough ;)

countach writes "Amazon are taking orders for a new Palm OS Wrist Watch. It has an infra-red port, touch screen, back-light, stylus and 2MB of RAM. Price is $US 295.00." Because sometimes you don't look nerdy enough ;)

Never Rock Fila writes "On the front page of tomorrow's New York Times Book Review, a slightly breathless but overdue enthusiastic review of Ellen Ullman's new novel, The Bug. The review acknowledges that 'Ullman has already established herself as an indispensable voice out of the world of technology' -- if you haven't read her first book, a memoir, Close to the Machine, read that too -- and it's nice to see a mainstream publication like the Times, the gold standard of book reviews as I understand it, giving such prominent and positive attention to a novel by a former 'software engineer' that's all about getting inside the mind of a programmer, even concluding 'If more contemporary novels delivered news this relevant and wise they'd have to stop declaring the death of the novel.' The reviewer, one Benjamin Anastas, has the chops to develop a sustained comparison to Mary Shelley, to legitimately place the 1984 computer programmers at the center of the novel among 'all the best characters in fiction,' and to declare the book 'thrilling and intellectually fearless.'"

Never Rock Fila writes "On the front page of tomorrow's New York Times Book Review, a slightly breathless but overdue enthusiastic review of Ellen Ullman's new novel, The Bug. The review acknowledges that 'Ullman has already established herself as an indispensable voice out of the world of technology' -- if you haven't read her first book, a memoir, Close to the Machine, read that too -- and it's nice to see a mainstream publication like the Times, the gold standard of book reviews as I understand it, giving such prominent and positive attention to a novel by a former 'software engineer' that's all about getting inside the mind of a programmer, even concluding 'If more contemporary novels delivered news this relevant and wise they'd have to stop declaring the death of the novel.' The reviewer, one Benjamin Anastas, has the chops to develop a sustained comparison to Mary Shelley, to legitimately place the 1984 computer programmers at the center of the novel among 'all the best characters in fiction,' and to declare the book 'thrilling and intellectually fearless.'"

honestpuck writes "I find it surprising that with the current popularity of the The Lord of The Rings movies and subsequent rise in sales of the trilogy and The Hobbit that so few bookshops stock more of the Professor's other works. Fortunately this volume makes it easier. It puts four of his works in one, Farmer Giles of Ham, The Adventures of Tom Bombadil Leaf By Niggle and Smith of Wootton Major." The first and fourth of these I've read elsewhere (and enjoyed), so I'm glad to learn of the other two. Read on for honestpuck's capsule description of each. Tales From The Perilous Realm author J.R.R. Tolkein pages 192 publisher Harper Collins rating 9 reviewer Tony Williams ISBN 0261103431 summary Excellent short stories and poetry from a master story-tellet Farmer Giles of Ham This is a marvelous tale of a reluctant, and accidental, hero and a dragon who doesn't quite live up to the stereotype. The style is a little old fashioned, making it seem more like the fairy tales of your childhood than even The Hobbit, with a dry sense of humour. That said, it also seems to be the hardest for a child to enjoy (my sample size is only two, however), though personally I liked it when I first read it and enjoy it still.. It is the longest of the four works and by far the earliest written and published, 1949. The Adventures of Tom Bombadil The Adventures is a collection of 16 assorted poems, most are either partially quoted or referred to in The Lord Of The Rings. The poems are a mixed bag, ranging from the short and amusing "Oliphaunt" through to the more adult and wistful "The Last Ship" that closes the collection. All are enjoyable for the adult reader, some enjoyable for children. Iâ(TM)ve never really liked Tolkienâ(TM)s verse when he tries to be serious, in this collection I only really like "Oliphaunt." Leaf By Niggle The shortest of the three stories, in this one Niggle, whose dreams far outweigh his talent, sets out to paint the perfect tree and is caught up in his own variation of the Pygmalion myth (though it is a tree that comes to life.) It is a marvelously written tale that unfolds beautifully. Smith of Wootton Major My favourite of them all, a tale in which Smith voyages to the land of the faeries via a magical cake. Another story that revolves around the dreams and fantasies in a life. This one is a perfect fairy tale and perfect for reading aloud to a small person, full of magic and charm and whimsy it brings to mind everything I loved about The Hobbit. Conclusion

While the three tales and 16 poems all have their differences there is certainly a distinctive style across them all. Just a little old-fashioned, a little formal - in fact almost exactly how you'd expect an Oxford Professor to write fiction. This volume is worth reading, and an enjoyable read but does not quite have the magnificence of language in The Lord of The Rings nor the wonderful light touch of well-crafted children's tale in The Hobbit. They are good short pieces, that sort of excellence is hard to craft into such short works.

Anyone who enjoyed The Hobbit will find this a wonderful volume. Tolkein always talked of writing both The Hobbit and The Lord of The Rings as a way of creating truly English myth and fairy tales (he felt that Arthur was too much a tale borrowed from the French). While both of those 'grew in the telling,' this small volume gives us three marvelous (and English in feel) fairy tales and some good poetry. A must for all Tolkein fans.

Tales from the Perilous Realm is harder to find than Tolkein's better-known works, but is available from online merchants including Amazon. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

porkrind writes "No Starch Press has announced its latest BSD title, Absolute OpenBSD, by Michael Lucas, scheduled to be in stores in July, 2003. Lucas is known as a FreeBSD contributor and the author of Absolute BSD. You can read all about it and pre-order now direct from No Starch Press or at Amazon."

binaryhead asks: "Well, the semester has just ended, and I have graduated from school! :-) I start my full-time job in a month and want to read a good book in the mean time. Having read Snowcrash, Neuromancer, and most of the hacker biographies, I am trying to find a scifi-geek-hacker book that people like. I might try the new Kevin Mitnick book, but I wanted to see what Slashdot preferred. Thanks."

arys asks: "I've been looking around for a good book on the GRE Computer Science subject test but all I found were a book that is out of print and an other that has the worst reviews possible. What I want to ask is those of you that have taken the test, how did you prepare for it?"

Stront asks: "No doubt like many on Slashdot, I am an avid reader of popular science, and am constantly on the search for good examples of the genre. Now, The Elegant Universe is probably the best on Superstrings; the excellent Genome received a very favourable review on Slashdot; and probably the most anticipated book on Quantum physics is the soon to be released The New Quantum Universe, the follow up to the highly rated The Quantum Universe. Now of the thousands of Popular Science books available, what does Slashdot recommend for the other innumerable sciences such as of relativity, molecular biology, consciousness, astronomy etc?"

Stront asks: "No doubt like many on Slashdot, I am an avid reader of popular science, and am constantly on the search for good examples of the genre. Now, The Elegant Universe is probably the best on Superstrings; the excellent Genome received a very favourable review on Slashdot; and probably the most anticipated book on Quantum physics is the soon to be released The New Quantum Universe, the follow up to the highly rated The Quantum Universe. Now of the thousands of Popular Science books available, what does Slashdot recommend for the other innumerable sciences such as of relativity, molecular biology, consciousness, astronomy etc?"

Stront asks: "No doubt like many on Slashdot, I am an avid reader of popular science, and am constantly on the search for good examples of the genre. Now, The Elegant Universe is probably the best on Superstrings; the excellent Genome received a very favourable review on Slashdot; and probably the most anticipated book on Quantum physics is the soon to be released The New Quantum Universe, the follow up to the highly rated The Quantum Universe. Now of the thousands of Popular Science books available, what does Slashdot recommend for the other innumerable sciences such as of relativity, molecular biology, consciousness, astronomy etc?"

Stront asks: "No doubt like many on Slashdot, I am an avid reader of popular science, and am constantly on the search for good examples of the genre. Now, The Elegant Universe is probably the best on Superstrings; the excellent Genome received a very favourable review on Slashdot; and probably the most anticipated book on Quantum physics is the soon to be released The New Quantum Universe, the follow up to the highly rated The Quantum Universe. Now of the thousands of Popular Science books available, what does Slashdot recommend for the other innumerable sciences such as of relativity, molecular biology, consciousness, astronomy etc?"

Stront asks: "No doubt like many on Slashdot, I am an avid reader of popular science, and am constantly on the search for good examples of the genre. Now, The Elegant Universe is probably the best on Superstrings; the excellent Genome received a very favourable review on Slashdot; and probably the most anticipated book on Quantum physics is the soon to be released The New Quantum Universe, the follow up to the highly rated The Quantum Universe. Now of the thousands of Popular Science books available, what does Slashdot recommend for the other innumerable sciences such as of relativity, molecular biology, consciousness, astronomy etc?"

apsmith writes "In the New York Times' Sunday Book Review Dennis Overbye reviews British Astronomer Royal Martin Rees' new book: Our Final Hour - A Scientist's Warning: How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future In This Century--On Earth and Beyond. The book paints an exceedingly grim picture of our future - Reese gives humanity only a 50-50 chance of surviving the 21st century, with all the potential for calamity we have unleashed (and that nature may have in store for us too). But the book isn't just doom and gloom - we CAN do something, and the answer lies in space. But NASA has been doing it all wrong. Interestingly enough, this coming weekend is the International Space Development Conference in San Jose, where you can find out the latest ideas on how we really should be settling space."

Anonymous Kamath writes "IEEE Spectrum recently published an interview with aerospace-engineer-turned-science-fiction-author Wil McCarthy who's just written his first non-fiction book "Hacking Matter: Levitating Chairs, Quantum Mirages and the Infinite Weirdness of Programmable Atoms" proposing the application of quantum dot technology on a large scale thereby allowing one to control properties of materials at will. Another science fiction author laid down the principles of geostationary satellite communication half a century ago."

PyTHON71 asks: "I'm working through Schaum's Outlines of College Algebra. So far, in chapter 17 (conic sections), I've found 6 errors! Since I can spot them and correct them, I'm not worried about myself. But without math, you can't hack, and if young hackers are getting hung up on stupid math mistakes made by textbook authors... well, it's obviously a case for FDL textbooks. Are any textbooks being produced under the FDL?"

kinema writes "It looks like The UNIX-Hater's Handbook has been made availible online for free. You'll never guess who's server it is on." Worth noting that the book was written some time ago, and that much of what is in there is ancient history. But still worth a look.

santos_douglas writes "Extreme Tech has this article in which Tim O'Reilly, the man behind every geeks favorite tech manuals, points toward four major leading indicators that will predict the next likely 'killer app' to emerge from the hacker community. They are: (1) Amazon.com web services (2) BARWN (3) Hardware hackers and (4) online gaming communities."

peterwayner writes "If you're looking for more proof that good stories happen to those who can tell them, pick up a copy of James McManus's Positively Fifth Street, an adrenaline-charged, first person account of a reporter sent to cover the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. But why sit on the sidelines? He decides the only way to capture the true flavor is to risk his advance and enter. Along the way, he uses his journalistic license to justify trips to strip clubs, interviews with all of the female players, examinations of the ex-stripper wife of the tournament host, investigations of a murder, and winning bigger and bigger bets at the poker table." Sounds like fun. Read on for the rest of the review. Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker author James McManus pages 416 publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux rating 8 reviewer Peter Wayner ISBN 0374236488 summary Journalist enters poker tournament.

This book is a bit of an oddity in the literature of poker, a subject that McManus teaches along with creative writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Most of the books in the field are manuals designed to teach a beginning player how to calculate the odds, bluff at the right time, and size up the rivals. The books may be informative and helpful, but the largely clinical approach does little for the casual reader.

McManus doesn't bother much with the rules of the game because he's out to explore the nexus of lust, competition and desire that gives Las Vegas such a hold on the human undersoul. To ensure that no one mistakes this for a traditional poker book, he opens with a sex-and-drug-saturated rendition of the murder of Ted Binion, one of the owners of the casino that sponsors the poker tournament each year. None of the wealth begat by poker helped Binion after he had the misfortune to marry the one ex-stripper who would later face murder charges for his death.

Despite witnessing the pain and agony visited by the money upon Binion, McManus still can't resist chasing after his share in the tournament. He has four kids to take care of and his wife is home clipping coupons. Sure, he could just write about the tournament and play it safe, but wouldn't it make sense to enter just to get a feel of it? And gosh, if he wins, he could really pay down that mortgage. Bad Jim, as he calls himself, thinks it makes perfect sense and grabs some poker software for practice.

Bad Jim has plenty of other journalistic rationalizations up his sleeve. Some of the book is devoted to his interviews with female poker players, a relatively rarity with the politically correct power to trump any complaint that this is just a thinly veiled excuse to leave the kids at home and play poker. This angle reaches a humorous climax when he finds himself in a showdown against one female and confesses, "no one wants this woman to win the event more than I do, just not this pot."

A queen on the board means that the woman wins, "paying Bad Jim back personally for two hundred years of poker domination by men, plus millions of years of the other kind." Any other card lets Good Jim take home the cash to support his wife and daughters. Who will win, Politically Correct Jim or Old School Jim?

The book is a seemingly endless stream of these confrontations where the action on the tables reflects a tension between our high-toned aspirations and baser human longings. There are plenty of learned allusions to remind us that he does teach writing at a fancy college, but they are mixed into a narrative driven by sex and greed. Has evolution given us a need for competition and battles to the death? Is poker a good substitute now that we're more civilized? Has the poker prep software given nerds and geeks an edge over the "leather-assed Texas road gamblers?"

His seemingly endless good fortune and his ability to string the conflicts into a story with various remain the strength of the book. He just can't seem to lose. And this is a good thing because the jury in the Binion murder trial is taking forever to make up its mind. Something needs to keep the tension building and Bad Jim's good luck delivers.

So he manages to string us along for almost 400 pages until we find out who wins the tournament and whether Binion's wife goes to jail. It's a terrific exploration of power, sex and death boiled into one short visit to Las Vegas. It's even better if you love poker because the endless descriptions of the hands must be a bit hard on those who don't see the fun in sitting around a smoky hall dealing cards. If you do, though, this is a wonderful read.

Peter Wayner is the author of Translucent Databases and Disappearing Cryptography. You can purchase Positively Fifth Street from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

peterwayner writes "If you're looking for more proof that good stories happen to those who can tell them, pick up a copy of James McManus's Positively Fifth Street, an adrenaline-charged, first person account of a reporter sent to cover the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. But why sit on the sidelines? He decides the only way to capture the true flavor is to risk his advance and enter. Along the way, he uses his journalistic license to justify trips to strip clubs, interviews with all of the female players, examinations of the ex-stripper wife of the tournament host, investigations of a murder, and winning bigger and bigger bets at the poker table." Sounds like fun. Read on for the rest of the review. Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker author James McManus pages 416 publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux rating 8 reviewer Peter Wayner ISBN 0374236488 summary Journalist enters poker tournament.

This book is a bit of an oddity in the literature of poker, a subject that McManus teaches along with creative writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Most of the books in the field are manuals designed to teach a beginning player how to calculate the odds, bluff at the right time, and size up the rivals. The books may be informative and helpful, but the largely clinical approach does little for the casual reader.

McManus doesn't bother much with the rules of the game because he's out to explore the nexus of lust, competition and desire that gives Las Vegas such a hold on the human undersoul. To ensure that no one mistakes this for a traditional poker book, he opens with a sex-and-drug-saturated rendition of the murder of Ted Binion, one of the owners of the casino that sponsors the poker tournament each year. None of the wealth begat by poker helped Binion after he had the misfortune to marry the one ex-stripper who would later face murder charges for his death.

Despite witnessing the pain and agony visited by the money upon Binion, McManus still can't resist chasing after his share in the tournament. He has four kids to take care of and his wife is home clipping coupons. Sure, he could just write about the tournament and play it safe, but wouldn't it make sense to enter just to get a feel of it? And gosh, if he wins, he could really pay down that mortgage. Bad Jim, as he calls himself, thinks it makes perfect sense and grabs some poker software for practice.

Bad Jim has plenty of other journalistic rationalizations up his sleeve. Some of the book is devoted to his interviews with female poker players, a relatively rarity with the politically correct power to trump any complaint that this is just a thinly veiled excuse to leave the kids at home and play poker. This angle reaches a humorous climax when he finds himself in a showdown against one female and confesses, "no one wants this woman to win the event more than I do, just not this pot."

A queen on the board means that the woman wins, "paying Bad Jim back personally for two hundred years of poker domination by men, plus millions of years of the other kind." Any other card lets Good Jim take home the cash to support his wife and daughters. Who will win, Politically Correct Jim or Old School Jim?

The book is a seemingly endless stream of these confrontations where the action on the tables reflects a tension between our high-toned aspirations and baser human longings. There are plenty of learned allusions to remind us that he does teach writing at a fancy college, but they are mixed into a narrative driven by sex and greed. Has evolution given us a need for competition and battles to the death? Is poker a good substitute now that we're more civilized? Has the poker prep software given nerds and geeks an edge over the "leather-assed Texas road gamblers?"

His seemingly endless good fortune and his ability to string the conflicts into a story with various remain the strength of the book. He just can't seem to lose. And this is a good thing because the jury in the Binion murder trial is taking forever to make up its mind. Something needs to keep the tension building and Bad Jim's good luck delivers.

So he manages to string us along for almost 400 pages until we find out who wins the tournament and whether Binion's wife goes to jail. It's a terrific exploration of power, sex and death boiled into one short visit to Las Vegas. It's even better if you love poker because the endless descriptions of the hands must be a bit hard on those who don't see the fun in sitting around a smoky hall dealing cards. If you do, though, this is a wonderful read.

Peter Wayner is the author of Translucent Databases and Disappearing Cryptography. You can purchase Positively Fifth Street from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

peterwayner writes "If you're looking for more proof that good stories happen to those who can tell them, pick up a copy of James McManus's Positively Fifth Street, an adrenaline-charged, first person account of a reporter sent to cover the World Series of Poker in Las Vegas. But why sit on the sidelines? He decides the only way to capture the true flavor is to risk his advance and enter. Along the way, he uses his journalistic license to justify trips to strip clubs, interviews with all of the female players, examinations of the ex-stripper wife of the tournament host, investigations of a murder, and winning bigger and bigger bets at the poker table." Sounds like fun. Read on for the rest of the review. Positively Fifth Street: Murderers, Cheetahs, and Binion's World Series of Poker author James McManus pages 416 publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux rating 8 reviewer Peter Wayner ISBN 0374236488 summary Journalist enters poker tournament.

This book is a bit of an oddity in the literature of poker, a subject that McManus teaches along with creative writing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Most of the books in the field are manuals designed to teach a beginning player how to calculate the odds, bluff at the right time, and size up the rivals. The books may be informative and helpful, but the largely clinical approach does little for the casual reader.

McManus doesn't bother much with the rules of the game because he's out to explore the nexus of lust, competition and desire that gives Las Vegas such a hold on the human undersoul. To ensure that no one mistakes this for a traditional poker book, he opens with a sex-and-drug-saturated rendition of the murder of Ted Binion, one of the owners of the casino that sponsors the poker tournament each year. None of the wealth begat by poker helped Binion after he had the misfortune to marry the one ex-stripper who would later face murder charges for his death.

Despite witnessing the pain and agony visited by the money upon Binion, McManus still can't resist chasing after his share in the tournament. He has four kids to take care of and his wife is home clipping coupons. Sure, he could just write about the tournament and play it safe, but wouldn't it make sense to enter just to get a feel of it? And gosh, if he wins, he could really pay down that mortgage. Bad Jim, as he calls himself, thinks it makes perfect sense and grabs some poker software for practice.

Bad Jim has plenty of other journalistic rationalizations up his sleeve. Some of the book is devoted to his interviews with female poker players, a relatively rarity with the politically correct power to trump any complaint that this is just a thinly veiled excuse to leave the kids at home and play poker. This angle reaches a humorous climax when he finds himself in a showdown against one female and confesses, "no one wants this woman to win the event more than I do, just not this pot."

A queen on the board means that the woman wins, "paying Bad Jim back personally for two hundred years of poker domination by men, plus millions of years of the other kind." Any other card lets Good Jim take home the cash to support his wife and daughters. Who will win, Politically Correct Jim or Old School Jim?

The book is a seemingly endless stream of these confrontations where the action on the tables reflects a tension between our high-toned aspirations and baser human longings. There are plenty of learned allusions to remind us that he does teach writing at a fancy college, but they are mixed into a narrative driven by sex and greed. Has evolution given us a need for competition and battles to the death? Is poker a good substitute now that we're more civilized? Has the poker prep software given nerds and geeks an edge over the "leather-assed Texas road gamblers?"

His seemingly endless good fortune and his ability to string the conflicts into a story with various remain the strength of the book. He just can't seem to lose. And this is a good thing because the jury in the Binion murder trial is taking forever to make up its mind. Something needs to keep the tension building and Bad Jim's good luck delivers.

So he manages to string us along for almost 400 pages until we find out who wins the tournament and whether Binion's wife goes to jail. It's a terrific exploration of power, sex and death boiled into one short visit to Las Vegas. It's even better if you love poker because the endless descriptions of the hands must be a bit hard on those who don't see the fun in sitting around a smoky hall dealing cards. If you do, though, this is a wonderful read.

Peter Wayner is the author of Translucent Databases and Disappearing Cryptography. You can purchase Positively Fifth Street from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

lawrencekhoo writes "The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting article about the Gottman Institute's (a.k.a. the love lab) work on modeling the dynamics of marital conversations. These models are described in John Gottman et. al.'s recent book The Mathematics of Marriage: Dynamic Nonlinear Models (MIT Press). Should be an interesting read for anyone who ever wondered if human interactions could be mathematically modeled."

Jedi Paramedic writes "Boston.com has an interesting story about the rise and fall of everyone's favorite file-swapping service. Also the subject of a new book by Joseph Menn, the story goes into great detail about the unfortunate-but-heroic Shawn Fanning and his reluctance to admit that his uncle, who in the end masterminded little more than the lining of his own pockets, had taken advantage of him. From getting screwed in the original 70/30 split with his uncle to his uncle's refusal to loosen his iron grip on the company even at the expense of its very being, the article (and the book) go a long way in chronicling the rise and fall of Napster, and crediting Shawn for not airing the family's dirty laundry. An interesting and well-written read."

peterwayner writes "If you're a bit tired of programming books, API descriptions, tables of keywords, and arguments about which data structure is buzzword compliant, super-mega-efficient and intuitively easy to grasp, turn to Developing Online Games , a book that seems to have very little interest in many of the traditional challenges for programmers. The authors spend four lines discussing the best computer language for the job (C/C++), conclude that objects give "far more flexibility in design" and then move on to fun questions like how to make a online game compelling for achievers, socializers, killers and explorers. This book is a wonderful psychoanalysis of the gamer's mind and it should be the first and last book read by game developers about to start a quest to capture the hearts, minds and subscription fees of people on the Internet." Read on for the rest of Peter's review. Developing Online Games author Jessica Mulligan and Bridgette Patrovsky pages 495 publisher New Riders rating 8 reviewer Peter Wayner ISBN 1592730000 summary The Sociology of building online games.

The book's strength lies in the deep experience of the authors and the efficient, occasionally gimlet-eyed voice they use to analyze their collective addiction. Jessica Mulligan's bio lists work on more than 50 online games like Ultima Online, while Bridgette Patrovsky's includes time building games for Electronic Arts, Sony and Interplay Online Services. If you believe that Online games are the latest thing, Mulligan would like you to know that you're wrong. She wrote a column celebrating the 30th birthday of the Online game in 1999. Rick Blomme wrote Spacewar back in 1969 and Dave Arneson started an RPG named Blackmoor in 1970 or 1971. It was so long ago, he can't be quite sure.

All of this experience weighs a bit heavily on the authors. The book is more of a core dump than a logical progression and that means we hear bitter echoes of the past. One section is entitled "Yes, it really will take 2-3 years to complete" and another is called "No, More Programmers Won't Make it Go Faster." These sections don't add much to the usual literature about herding cats, but they do offer a strong reminder that this isn't a task for slackers who never could get around to forming that garage band.

The better parts are aimed at the design of the games themselves. While game players are slaying monsters or saving Princesses, game designers are questing after a full Player Satisfaction Matrix. Good games sate the player's need for socialization, accomplishment, discovery and conflict as they journey from the state of confusion (0-1 month), on to excitement (2-4 months), glide through the state of involvement (5-48+ months) before landing in boredom (until VH1 starts making "Behind the Game" documentaries). The trick to good design is making sure that there's plenty to feed the player's involvement.

For instance, you may be driven to create a new persistent world that emphasizes socialization because you're tired of all that death. The authors gamed that scenario and decided that "killers do have a positive role to play from the point of view of the socializers." Good can't exist without evil acting as a contrast and besides, players can usually find some other passive/aggressive technique for stabbing each other in the back even if knife objects aren't instantiated.

The authors tend to view the online realms as ecosystems. If you want to "increase the number of achievers," then the authors advise that you "reduce the number of killers, but not too much" while maybe "increas[ing] the number of explorers." I suspect that these recommendations are to be taken with a grain of salt, but they do reflect the observations of people who've spent a long time managing these games. I'm even tempted to develop my own Sim Sim that lets you simulate the process of crafting a simulation.

Ultimately it's hard for the authors to offer much more than these recipes and matrices. The details about the management, the strategies for stopping cheaters, and the intricacies of player relations are essential parts of the journey, but those are only half of the battle. Making the characters sing and the world come to life is a job for the artist.

This book is like many of the simple guides for writing a screenplay. They talk about arcs, hinge points and beats, but end up counseling that the screenwriter should aim to make each of these "good," This book can't tell you how to make your characters "good," but it can give you much insight into how others have done it before.

You can purchase Developing Online Games from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

tadghin writes "I was recently talking with Jeff Barr, creator of syndic8 and now Amazon's chief web services evangelist. He let drop an interesting tidbit. Amazon has both SOAP and REST interfaces to their web services, and 85% of their usage is of the REST interface." Read on for some more thoughts and information on REST and Web services, including information about a free Web services seminar on April 22nd. " Despite all of the corporate hype over the SOAP stack, this is pretty compelling evidence that developers like the simpler REST approach. (I'm sure there are applications where SOAP is better, but I've always liked technologies that have low barriers to entry and grassroots adoption, and simple XML over HTTP approach seems to have that winning combination.)

Amazon's web services have attracted a thriving community, people are making real money building alternate interfaces to Amazon and collecting Associates commissions on the resulting sales, and there are even tool developers who have come up with the creative business model of agreeing with their users to have some percentage of the transactions use the tool developer's Associates id rather than the site owner's. Cool.

Amazon is holding a free all day web services workshop on April 22 at the O'Reilly Emerging Technologies Conference. The event is open to people not registered at the conference (though space is limited to 50 people).

P.S. Slashdot really ought to have web services as a topic area! Despite being over-hyped, this is a really important area, and there's a lot cooking. Amazon's web services"

Bill Venners writes "This week I've published the fourth installment of my interview with Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, the authors of the best-selling book, The Pragmatic Programmer. In this installment, Dave and Andy talk about their recommended approach to design in which details are pulled out of the code and stored as metadata. This installment of the interview really made me think. Their focus on metadata sounded non-intuitive when I read their book, but in actually talking to them about it, I got the feeling they might be on to something. Check out: Abstraction and Detail."

peterwayner writes "One mathematician I know told me that the most important lesson he learned was how to read a math book. It did no good, he said, to just start plowing through the theorems because that brought confusion. The key was to skim the book five or six times to get an idea of what the writer was trying to do. Then, and only then, was it possible to figure out the equations. This is what Barry Mazur tries to do in his book Imagining Numbers . There are some equations, graphs and diagrams, but first and foremost he offers plenty of poetry, philosophy and history to lay a foundation for understanding imaginary numbers." Peter's review continues below -- despite its complicated, abstract subject matter, he says that it's "simple enough to be accessible to most who will be interested in it." Imagining Numbers author Barry Mazur pages 267 publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux rating 8 reviewer Peter Wayner ISBN 0374174695 summary How to imagine imaginary numbers like the square root of minus fifteen.

Much of modern mathematical literature is structured with crisp, scripted precision. First there is theorem one, then theorem two, which leads to theorem three, which could only be followed by theorem four, and so on until we reach theorem n. If you want to learn the mathematics of complex numbers (a +bi), then classic texts (this or this) will get you there.

Some may like this logical progression, but it leaves others cold in the same way that crisp, modern architecture by Mies van de Rohe leaves some craving a more layered, fractured, ornate, organic and just plain fun place to live and work. Less isn't more, as Robert Venturi said, less is a bore.

If you happen to feel a chill when churning through an assembly line of theorems, you might enjoy the treatment of Mazur, a professor at Harvard who seems to spend as much time reading poets like Rilke or Stevens as he does examining old mathematical texts. Mazur is not the kind of machine that turns coffee into theorems-- he's too busy stopping to smell the rhetorical flourishes.

The book isn't aimed at mathematicians per se. The publisher, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux specializes in mainstream literature and that's probably the best pigeonhole for this book. Mazur wants the reader to understand how to think about imaginary numbers, not evaluate some integrals -- and that reader could really be anyone with the desire to think about mathematical things. The book is simple enough to be accessible to most who will be interested in it.

In many ways, Mazur attempted a much harder task than just teaching complex analysis. It's one thing to learn how to find the roots of polynomials, but it's another thing to try to help people get a feeling or an intuition for the square root of minus fifteen. Integers are easy to understand and even feel by counting out things, but imaginary numbers don't seem to exist. Mathematicians have spent many years trying to find the best metaphors and structures to understand how to find answers for all polynomials and it's never been an easy struggle.

The best part of the book is, without doubt, the historical treatment of how other mathematicians confronted the question of irrational and complex numbers. These ideas have always been hard to grasp and it took time to evolve the most compact and consistent nomenclature.

If you're interested in mathematics as more than just a mechanism that churns out answers, you'll probably enjoy the book. It's a light, friendly, philosophical expedition looking for a way to make imaginary numbers work in our minds.

Peter Wayner is the author of Translucent Databases , a book on how to imagine databases that hold no information yet still do useful work. You can purchase Imagining Numbers from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

peterwayner writes "One mathematician I know told me that the most important lesson he learned was how to read a math book. It did no good, he said, to just start plowing through the theorems because that brought confusion. The key was to skim the book five or six times to get an idea of what the writer was trying to do. Then, and only then, was it possible to figure out the equations. This is what Barry Mazur tries to do in his book Imagining Numbers . There are some equations, graphs and diagrams, but first and foremost he offers plenty of poetry, philosophy and history to lay a foundation for understanding imaginary numbers." Peter's review continues below -- despite its complicated, abstract subject matter, he says that it's "simple enough to be accessible to most who will be interested in it." Imagining Numbers author Barry Mazur pages 267 publisher Farrar, Straus and Giroux rating 8 reviewer Peter Wayner ISBN 0374174695 summary How to imagine imaginary numbers like the square root of minus fifteen.

Much of modern mathematical literature is structured with crisp, scripted precision. First there is theorem one, then theorem two, which leads to theorem three, which could only be followed by theorem four, and so on until we reach theorem n. If you want to learn the mathematics of complex numbers (a +bi), then classic texts (this or this) will get you there.

Some may like this logical progression, but it leaves others cold in the same way that crisp, modern architecture by Mies van de Rohe leaves some craving a more layered, fractured, ornate, organic and just plain fun place to live and work. Less isn't more, as Robert Venturi said, less is a bore.

If you happen to feel a chill when churning through an assembly line of theorems, you might enjoy the treatment of Mazur, a professor at Harvard who seems to spend as much time reading poets like Rilke or Stevens as he does examining old mathematical texts. Mazur is not the kind of machine that turns coffee into theorems-- he's too busy stopping to smell the rhetorical flourishes.

The book isn't aimed at mathematicians per se. The publisher, Farrar, Strauss and Giroux specializes in mainstream literature and that's probably the best pigeonhole for this book. Mazur wants the reader to understand how to think about imaginary numbers, not evaluate some integrals -- and that reader could really be anyone with the desire to think about mathematical things. The book is simple enough to be accessible to most who will be interested in it.

In many ways, Mazur attempted a much harder task than just teaching complex analysis. It's one thing to learn how to find the roots of polynomials, but it's another thing to try to help people get a feeling or an intuition for the square root of minus fifteen. Integers are easy to understand and even feel by counting out things, but imaginary numbers don't seem to exist. Mathematicians have spent many years trying to find the best metaphors and structures to understand how to find answers for all polynomials and it's never been an easy struggle.

The best part of the book is, without doubt, the historical treatment of how other mathematicians confronted the question of irrational and complex numbers. These ideas have always been hard to grasp and it took time to evolve the most compact and consistent nomenclature.

If you're interested in mathematics as more than just a mechanism that churns out answers, you'll probably enjoy the book. It's a light, friendly, philosophical expedition looking for a way to make imaginary numbers work in our minds.

Peter Wayner is the author of Translucent Databases , a book on how to imagine databases that hold no information yet still do useful work. You can purchase Imagining Numbers from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

bangpath asks: "I realize that many of my peers aspire to become managers in their field/respective subfields, but upon visiting Amazon and Barnes & Noble, I noticed a significant lacking in books about IT management. That is, most books that came up under this search were IT project management or IT systems management. Surely, these are important areas that an IT manager deals with frequently, but what about dealing with the people, policy, and responsibilities of IT? One would think that IT workers aren't the same as HR people, or Accountants, or the other types of people you'd find in a typical office. Can anyone recommend any books specifically about managing IT Professionals?"

prostoalex writes "Internet's largest retailer is setting up a domain name registration business. Wall Street Journal recently found out that in December Amazon.com got approved as domain name registrar. According to people from ICANN, the registration included rights for .com, .net,. org, .biz and .info TLDs."

Skyshadow writes "Vermont Bookseller Bear Pond Books has announced that they will purge their sales records at the request of customers . This would effectively sidestep typically insideous a provision of the PATRIOT Act which allows government agencies to secretly seize sales records. The store's co-owner, Michael Katzenberg, put it this way: 'When the CIA comes and asks what you've read because they're suspicious of you, we can't tell them because we don't have it... That's just a basic right, to be able to read what you want without fear that somebody is looking over your shoulder to see what you're reading.' Now if only certain other booksellers would show that same conscience, we might have something here."