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What happens if we don't "participate" Comrade Obama?

What's next? A Council of Americanism?

I recommend learning and reading over passive propaganda any day.
Try these non-political books: Naked Economics and Learn to Earn.

Leave the passive stuff to the sheep.

Obviously, he should have been using one of these.

I've been using, for basic assembler learning, Assembly Language Step-by-step: Programming with DOS and Linux.

It's pretty in-depth and useful for a basic learning book, and thanks to this I now know the difference between .com and .exe (remember those from the DOS days?) from a DOS assembler perspective

Example of a recent actual purchase: Food Rules. $5 paper, $5 kindle.

I'd consider that a particularly good example of getting far less value in the kindle version, because that is exactly the kind of book that I would want to give to a friend when I'm done with it.

At the 2008 CES dozens of ARM "netbooks" running Linux were displayed and a big hit at the show. They were produced on ARM and Linux because Intel didn't have Atom yet so no cheap x86 processor with any horsepower, and Microsoft charged $89 for XP.

$89 as the wholesale price - the OEM price - for XP?

Quoted for purchases of 10,000 units? 100,000? A million? To put this in perspective, the brand-name Win 7 netbook has already broken the $300 price point. HP Mini 210-1010NR 10.1-Inch Black Netbook

So you ask what killed the Arm Netbook?

Sales.

No one in big box retail fought longer and harder to make a go of Linux than WalMart.

Nothing came of it.

Walmart.com currently lists 111 laptops, 48 desktops, all Windows, and all but a bare handful running Win 7 Home Premium.

What I find most surprising - and significant - is the disappearance of the netbook from WalMart's retail shelves.

Down to a lone Dell Nickelodeon branded laptop for kids.

It could just be that WalMart's customers are finding other products more compelling: Kodak Zi8 Aqua Pocket 1080p Video Camera $180.

I've seen them at Buy.com (2), at Amazon.com, at Kmart.com and plenty other places for even cheaper.

The point of this video is to show that Android and the much faster Android web browser can make all these cheap laptops much more usable when it comes to browsing the web. The Android browser is 100x better than the one in Windows CE or the previous Mozilla-based one they would integrate in those $100 Laptops. More usable means more people will want to buy it, which means even cheaper prices.

It does seem to me that one of the problems with decrypting "stuff" is that you need to have some idea what the "answer" will look like.

This is a very good point. The book Battle of Wits: The Complete Story of Codebreaking in World War II explains in great detail how various Axis codes were broken by the Allies. Knowing what the "answer" looked like was essential for much of the codebreaking. In fact, Turing's masterful technique to use machines to automatically decrypt messages encrypted by the more advanced German Enigma machines relied on knowing exactly a portion of the plaintext of one of the messages. Once one message was cracked this way they were usually able to rather quickly decrypt all the other messages that used the same key that day.

Much of the WW-II vintage decryption was based on exploiting patterns in the plaintext (such as letter or word frequency) that left a trace in the encrypted messages. It is amazing how extremely subtle patterns were detected and then exploited. IMO, most of WW-II codebreaking was based on these subtle patterns. The other part of the codebreaking involved stealing the keys (codebooks, etc.) from the enemy.

As you suggest, if there is no pattern in the plaintext then breaking the encryption is much harder and often impossible.

I have the Acer Aspire One. Got it on sale from Frys for $300 last year.

9 Cell ( 7 to 10 hours!) Spare Battery, $75
http://www.amazon.com/HQRP-Replacement-Lithium-Ion-Subnotebook-Mousepad/dp/B001P0F71G/

Spare AC Adapter, $21
http://www.amazon.com/HQRP-Replacement-Subnotebook-Netbook-Mousepad/dp/B001ODA6II/

Notebook Hardware Control
http://www.pbus-167.com/nhc/nhc.htm

I do the occasional reading of eBooks on it. With Adobe Acrobat you can rotate .pdfs. iRotate will also let you rotate the whole screen.

Cheers

I have the Acer Aspire One. Got it on sale from Frys for $300 last year.

9 Cell ( 7 to 10 hours!) Spare Battery, $75
http://www.amazon.com/HQRP-Replacement-Lithium-Ion-Subnotebook-Mousepad/dp/B001P0F71G/

Spare AC Adapter, $21
http://www.amazon.com/HQRP-Replacement-Subnotebook-Netbook-Mousepad/dp/B001ODA6II/

Notebook Hardware Control
http://www.pbus-167.com/nhc/nhc.htm

I do the occasional reading of eBooks on it. With Adobe Acrobat you can rotate .pdfs. iRotate will also let you rotate the whole screen.

Cheers

The Carcassone Big Box will run you $90. Worth it.

The Carcassone Big Box will run you $90.

How about you give me a 10" Netbook (usual specs, maybe 2GB ram), give it one of those screens you can twist around and use as a tablet, and make it a touch screen. Price it below 500$. Let it be able to run XP and 7.

I don't know how crucial that last 1" of display is, but ASUS has what you're looking for (with a 9" display). According to the specs, it's multi-touch capable and comes with Windows 7 Home Premium for less than $500.

You're seriously complaining about the price? It's $10 more than the Kindle DX and offers a LOT of additional features for that $10 difference.

Are you serious? Right, because lobby groups would never ever stoop so far as to make insubstantial, thinly-veiled smear films to discred- Oh, woops. Too late.

And have you been out much? I mean, really talked to the average Joe Schmoe on the street? You'd be surprised, and more than a little frightened, I hope, at the meaningless drivel some of them go for. The bigger problem is also how much the most vocal of this growing Confederacy of Dunces is able to get the attention of mainstream media. In case you haven't noticed, Glenn Pecker- I mean, Glenn Beck, was featured as a guest anal-est- I mean, analyst, on CNN, and Bill-O is showing up on GMA to give the President a "report card." Why are the fan blades suddenly brown, and what in God's name is that rancid odor?

Explanation, and if you want to do a deep dive here's a good book on the subject by Adi Shamir of RSA fame.

There are so many Rent-A-Coder jobs that want Joomla! extensions. And at $35.39 (free shipping!) at Amazon, you'll pay this off with just 4 or 5 RAC assignments! Then again, if you get a "duplicate [Jommla! website] maximum bid $100" you'll be able to pay it off with one job!

Yep! Do what you love and the money will follow!

I noted the touchscreen.

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B002GCR04Y/ref=ord_cart_shr?_encoding=UTF8&m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&v=glance

There you go. There is a full netbook with keyboard, a full OS, and it coverts to a tablet by flipping the screen around, and then using it as a touchscreen. You can buy it today, and it is cheaper than the iPad.

I forgot to mention that most $300 netbooks have a bigger screen than the iPad as well.

And as someone who owns an iPhone (and has a love/hate relationship with it), surfing the web is MUCH, MUCH better with a keyboard and mouse than your finger. Curling up on the couch with a netbook does beat the iPhone.

Conceptually, this has been done before, with the planets of our solar system. I can only hope Mickey's turns out as well.

I've yet to see a compelling reason to pay more for a tablet. My Acer Aspire cost less than any tablet I've seen yet but does quite a bit more. The only thing it is missing is the touch component but I have yet to find an app that makes me care.
 
If someone comes out with a tablet that is prices competitively with notebooks and has the same level of features, I'd think about it more seriously.

but don't have any incentive to so long as the DRM keeps their customers inside their walled gardens

They do have an incentive - competition:

I've never bought music from iTunes because of the DRM, plus I have other players that don't play AAC. However, my ripped CDs and Amazon MP3 purchases work seamlessly on my iPod (some of the debates on slashdot seem to overlook that). As you said, competition from Amazon might have had more to do with iTunes dumping audio DRM than any generosity on Jobs' part.

Also remember that there's an Amazon Kindle App for iPhone which presumably will work on iPad and/or be upgraded - so its not impossible that something similar could happen with books. Apple clearly either don't want to (or don't think they could get away with) rejecting Amazon from the App Store.

LARP: Army frowns on Dungeons and Dragons

A) That's the ISRAELI ARMY. B) We are discussing security clearance policies, not Army admission policies.

Cheesy novels and TV shows: Looked on FOX, only found CSI. NYT Best seller list gives 'Dear John' as your answer for this weeks' crappy novel. Although I prefer The Sword and the Shield if you want a non-crappy novel about the intelligence community to read (and that you have a reaonable chance of acquiring).

That book is about the KGB, we are discussing American Intelligence services.

How I became an "expert on the kind of thinking that goes on in the American Intelligence services": If I told you, I'd have to kill you. But TV News broadcasts are valid sources in open source intelligence.

And are generally not considered reliable sources of information. I mean, Fox News tells me that Obama is muslim and trying to sell our country to the arabs.

Have I ever worked in the intelligence industry: Yes, but I can only confirm dates of employment. Reason for security clearance rejection: Large outstanding debt and voluntary admission to a hospital for acute treatment of PTSD, suicide.

If anything, you had a clearance through some college intern program with a pencil-pushing research intelligence agency and were booted when they discovered you are unstable.

Who, exactly, is telling you that you MUST buy this device? Is Apple ORDERING you to buy one, like a mom orders a kid to finish his lima beans? Without that foundation, the rest of your argument pretty much falls apart. You want a general-purpose tablet, buy one. There have been locked-down tablets before. There will be more in the future. This is Apple's. There will always be a need for, and a supply of, general-purpose computers.

I've noticed that everyone seems to be focusing on my poor choice of words rather than my argument...wtg.

And there's the key point. Taco called the original iPod "lame" and Apple went on to sell 250,000,000 of them. They don't care what some geek on Slashdot--you, me, or him--thinks.

And here's the first half of my key point: what would they have lost by using a full-featured OS that still allowed you to use App Store applications? Hell, they could even keep the iPhone-like skin on it! The average person would still love how easily it could be used, and geeks like me would actually want the damn thing.

I'm not saying it isn't going to sell like gangbusters, because anything with an Apple logo sells well nowadays. I'm just saying that they ignored a segment of the market that they could have included ALONG WITH their main target market...yet didn't.

Really? They aren't trying to put anything past their customers. Apple makes it VERY CLEAR that this is not a general purpose computer. People will buy it, or not, and like it, or not. Just like any other device.

And that's the other half of my whole point. Why would I pay for a locked down, restricted half computer when I could buy an open, full computer at the same price? Here is a great example of one. hell, you could even make it a hackintosh and install OSX on it...the only difference is that the hardware wouldn't have the Apple logo stamped on it.

You are trying to convince me that paying more for a device that does less is somehow a good thing. It doesn't take a geek to see what's wrong with that statement.

A bad device? No, not bad, but overpriced considering you are locked into whatever Apple deems worthy of running.

Why not just get an ASUS T91MT? It's Intel based, you could prolly install OSX on it. There you go: functions exactly like an Apple Tablet without being locked down. Have fun.

Seriously. The only reason this thing is getting the publicity that it is comes from having that Apple logo on it. If it had a Microsoft logo or Google logo on it with all the same benefits and limitations, people would be avoiding it like the plauge.

Nope, no one is telling you that you are going to spend anything.

Hope that clears up the confusion.

Thanks, smart ass ;-)

A Kindle DX has about the same entry price, and is about the same size, and does less (OTOH, it does have a 3G connection, which you have to pay more for on the iPad.)

You're absolutely right, and I've told people that a Kindle DX is a waste of money as well (I advocate non-locked-down e-readers that support a wide range of formats.)

And paying about the price of a high-end, dedicated ebook reader to do it. Which has many of the same limitations, and less breadth of functionality (though it is better for the specific purpose of reading ebooks.)

And I have the same problems with high-end e-readers.

The iPad is hardly uniquely limited in the world of mobile devices.

Very true, but it had the potential to be far more than the delivered product. Keeping it locked to Apple's App store keeps things simple but Orwellian. Sorry, but if I'm dropping that much money on a device that looks and acts like a computer, I should be able to use it like one.

Had they gone with a ported version of OSX or a newer, less restricted OS, I would have been on board even with the problems I have regarding the hardware. I doubt I'm the only one that feels this way.

As it stands, if I want a tablet I'll just go with an ASUS T91MT for now, thanks.

More total bullshit. Star Trek and LARP are a mark against you for "some security clearances"? Not any that the American government issues. Where did you even come up with that? Pulled it out of some cheesy novel or crappy TV show? And how did you become an expert on the kind of thinking that goes on in the American Intelligence services? TV News broadcasts? NY Times Best Seller Novel? Have you ever even worked in the Intelligence industry? I bet you applied and were rejected, then rationalized it with your paranoid fictional reasons.

Star trek: Couldn't find a reference quickly.
LARP: Army frowns on Dungeons and Dragons
Cheesy novels and TV shows: Looked on FOX, only found CSI. NYT Best seller list gives 'Dear John' as your answer for this weeks' crappy novel. Although I prefer The Sword and the Shield if you want a non-crappy novel about the intelligence community to read (and that you have a reaonable chance of acquiring).
How I became an "expert on the kind of thinking that goes on in the American Intelligence services": If I told you, I'd have to kill you. But TV News broadcasts are valid sources in open source intelligence.
Have I ever worked in the intelligence industry: Yes, but I can only confirm dates of employment.
Reason for security clearance rejection: Large outstanding debt and voluntary admission to a hospital for acute treatment of PTSD, suicide.

If you buy a subsidized phone from a 3rd party retailer ( not the carrier ) they only get their money if you stick around for a while on your contract.

Amazon has a similar policy, dinging you $250 on a Blackberry from AT&T:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html/ref=cell_dp_activationLink?ie=UTF8&docId=508597

What's interesting, is Amazon's policy doesn't say anything about dodging the fee if you return the phone.

From the Amazon link, I found several reviews giving the book a thrashing for continuing to include deprecated APIs and not teaching the new paradigms of the APIs after OpenGL 3.0. One review was upset with the regurgitation and lack of new material. Another reviewer was looking for a book that concisely covers OpenGL 3.1 and the new way of coding things since 3.0 instead of the backwards compatible context and forward compatible context intricacies.

I was thinking of picking up a good OpenGL book but this one sounds like it'd be most useful to people who need to move old projects forward and have to deal with old APIs and transitioning the graphics up to 3.0. But if you're coding from scratch and want the latest OpenGL, this book might have a lot of material you shouldn't even pay attention to because it's deprecated. I guess for hobbyist meddling I'll stick to the wiki as it's a difficult task for people to write documentation books on a changing spec. Probably a good one stop shop for all versions of OpenGL but I think sometimes the spec implementers just want you to move forward and aim to ask you to do that as infrequently as possible. I guess 3.0 appears to have addressed that.

From the Amazon link, I found several reviews giving the book a thrashing for continuing to include deprecated APIs and not teaching the new paradigms of the APIs after OpenGL 3.0. One review was upset with the regurgitation and lack of new material. Another reviewer was looking for a book that concisely covers OpenGL 3.1 and the new way of coding things since 3.0 instead of the backwards compatible context and forward compatible context intricacies.

I was thinking of picking up a good OpenGL book but this one sounds like it'd be most useful to people who need to move old projects forward and have to deal with old APIs and transitioning the graphics up to 3.0. But if you're coding from scratch and want the latest OpenGL, this book might have a lot of material you shouldn't even pay attention to because it's deprecated. I guess for hobbyist meddling I'll stick to the wiki as it's a difficult task for people to write documentation books on a changing spec. Probably a good one stop shop for all versions of OpenGL but I think sometimes the spec implementers just want you to move forward and aim to ask you to do that as infrequently as possible. I guess 3.0 appears to have addressed that.

From the Amazon link, I found several reviews giving the book a thrashing for continuing to include deprecated APIs and not teaching the new paradigms of the APIs after OpenGL 3.0. One review was upset with the regurgitation and lack of new material. Another reviewer was looking for a book that concisely covers OpenGL 3.1 and the new way of coding things since 3.0 instead of the backwards compatible context and forward compatible context intricacies.

I was thinking of picking up a good OpenGL book but this one sounds like it'd be most useful to people who need to move old projects forward and have to deal with old APIs and transitioning the graphics up to 3.0. But if you're coding from scratch and want the latest OpenGL, this book might have a lot of material you shouldn't even pay attention to because it's deprecated. I guess for hobbyist meddling I'll stick to the wiki as it's a difficult task for people to write documentation books on a changing spec. Probably a good one stop shop for all versions of OpenGL but I think sometimes the spec implementers just want you to move forward and aim to ask you to do that as infrequently as possible. I guess 3.0 appears to have addressed that.

I couldn't find out how much eBay pays currently as they have changed their affiliate model, but Amazon offers up to 20% with game downloads, 15% with endless products and up to 8.5% with general products (I suspect Bing can easily qualify for the highest rates). Before eBay used to pay 50%-75% from their income per sale, so I think it's in the same ranges. Some other affiliate commissions can go up to 30-50%, so Microsoft could actually be making extra revenue with the Cashback program.

If you want to restore some of your sense of wonder have a read of the following book:
      'Power, Sex, Suicide: Mitochondria and the Meaning of Life'
It talks about one particular instance of horizontal evoluton that occured early in the evolution of life on earth, and the impact it had.

The only slightly informed...

Depends on whether they want a showdown with maybe Mozilla and definitely the Free Software community. Right now Google can probably claim that it is beta that they are only supporting H.264. However, if they persist in only supporting H.264 for youtube, they are basically saying that they do not want open source programs to be able to view youtube anywhere that H.264 is patented (which is more than just the US). Using a rate of $0.66/GB per year (Amazon S3 rate) the $5 million dollar MPEG-LA fee would buy about 7.2 petabytes of online storage ( 5e6/(0.055*12)/1024/1024 ) . So they can probably transcode and make it available online for something on the same order magnitude as the cost of the MPEG-LA licensing fee. I think it is fairly likely that Google will start supporting Ogg Theora/Vorbis as well.

http://aws.amazon.com/s3/
http://beerpla.net/2008/08/14/how-to-find-out-the-number-of-videos-on-youtube/

This really isn't entirely new; Dawkins' book The Selfish Gene is based around the idea that it's individual genes that are selected for, not organisms.

Calling it a myth when its entirely correct shows how out of touch Nature is with actual science.

Yeah, all of the scientists and journals are wrong..

The pH of the oceans is in constant flux and cannot be absolutely constant.

The problem is not that the meters can masure to this accuracy its the fact that sea water's pH varies by at least 0.1 pH on very short timescales.

There are many possible sources of experimental variance. That is why scientists use statistics to quantify variance. It is entirely possible to carry out T-tests on the sample data to discriminate between pH changes.

So you can't crack a book on science and you have no clue how climate parameters are measured and collated.

I recommend you read some basic books on experimentation and statistics e.g. Statistics for Experimenters. It is clear that you don't understand how experimental data is gathered, and you don't understand how statistics can be used to quantify and validate deviations between mean values.

Read Charles Stross' Accelerando.

Hehe! So true - I was there. Most of those 'creative new ideas' from the sixties were not only wrong, they were not new - the socio-political ideas were retreads from Max Weber, stripped of most meaning and taught to education professors in the 1930s by the Dewey socialists, and then picked up by the teaching students who taught it to the kids in the 1950s and 1960s.

See "The Closing of the American Mind" by Alan Bloom

Background on medical checklists saving lives (and yet meeting up with resistance at times from medical practitioners) in this important New Yorker piece by surgeon/writer Atul Gawande:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/10/071210fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all

Gawande now has a book out about checklists called "The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right" that expands on this and also describes the usefulness of checklists in other areas: http://www.amazon.com/Checklist-Manifesto-How-Things-Right/dp/0805091742 (If the topic interests you, btw, Amazon apparently is selling this $24.50 hardcover book for only $10).

Blaming him would be like blaming some make up guy for making Hollywood starlets set an impossibly high bar for beauty.

Presumably you'd disagree with it as well, but people do frequently blame the movie industry as a whole for such things, if not necessarily the makeup guy in particular.

Perhaps the 'Purple Wage' ?

I don't know if the artist is deliberately satirizing tulip bulb bubbles or not, but I think we all know what art is involved.

In the meantime you can buy The Art of the Con a good deal cheaper.

I hope the last buyer puts a teardown video on Youtube for Ars Technica types.

Frank Zappa had a good point. He claimed that the only thing art required was a frame .

With all due respect to Zappa, it's Marcel Duchamp who understood this first, around 1913.

Zappa didn't claim to have invented the theory, nor did he claim exclusivity on it.
He simply stated* that it is how he understands the question "what is art?"

* stated in The Real Frank Zappa Book, if you feel like lookig it up

I did a internship @ A.T. Cross (high-end pens/gifts), when they were dabbling with 'modernizing' the company and introducing digital products. (that are all now discontinued)

They made a device that would let you write on a paper pad, but @ the same time capture (in Vector format no less) your pen strokes, and then download them to a PC.

http://www.amazon.com/Cross-CrossPad-CP41001-01-Portable-Digital/dp/B00000K1R3

As a result, I got to play with a few of those, and used one in college. The software had OCR capability, but was coded by IBM, and was clunky. By College though, I had switched to linux by my 1st year, and coulden't find a viable way of running it :(

12 for 29cents that don't need a battery or $30 for this thing that does.... Doesn't seem pratical to me.

As a 30-something, I already do. There's a reason my ringtone is They Might Be Giants' "Minimum Wage"

Amazon has a system that lets you do what Paypal does, or much more with their API, depending on which part of their program you use. http://payments.amazon.com/

I've only used it for about $500 worth of transactions, but it does work well especially since many people already have an amazon account (there used to be an option for credit card transactions without an account too, but I don't know if it still exists - I can't find it right now)

Google checkout is the only other major player that I know of, but I never had an opportunity to use their service so I can't vouch for it.

Seriously, right now we are spending record peacetime levels on defense

I assume you're in the U.S., so I have to say... wha? We're in two wars right now! Maybe you mean that, in our current state of war, we're spending many multiples of peacetime levels?

Of course, your point is still valid-- military spending is extremely high even in peacetime. Sadly, that is the cost of being the first to do something. There's a very good account of this phenomena in the book Red Moon Rising: Sputnik and the Hidden Rivalries that Ignited the Space Age. Eisenhower was keenly aware of and attempted to avoid the problems of a large and influential military-industrial complex, and yet, he is largely responsible for getting it off the ground. In the end, pressure from both the American people and his own military forced his hand.

Why worry about smooth equatorial tracking? Rig your camera using the cheapest tracking solution you have or move it by hand if you have to. Who cares if it jitters. It just can't jitter during the exposure. Merge the photos into 1 frame by removing the jitter and combining exposures.

A 100 second exposure pic is equal to 100 one second exposure pics. The problem is in finding software to stitch the photos into 1 frame. The easiest to try is to just get PhotoShop. Stitch the photos into 1 with Photo Merge. You can also experiment with PhotoShop HDR merge. You may have to tweak the contrast/brightness and light levels before or after.

2nd option is using video stabilization software to remove the jitter. There are tons of software options for that but you want one will accept very large resolution pics with large dimensions. You want apps that will work on frames as individual photos instead of enforcing video formats on import and export. Off the shell software might be tuned for pics with normal daylight exposure, so look for options to fine tune the algorithm to work on dimly exposed pics.

If the software won't work on dimly exposed pics, perhaps you can experiment with batch processing the files to increase contrast and brightness or tweak the lighting levels. (Lots of software options.) Feed the result into the stabilization software. Batch process again to reverse the contrast/brightness increase.

The post-process step is to stitch and merge the photos into one as before. Plain stitching used to create panorama shots won't work. It needs to sum the exposure data. Photo apps solve these types of problems so there's a good chance it would work with PhotoShop or Paint Shop Pro (with "HDR Photo Merge). You could shoot a series of fast exposures for the raw data and 1 long blurry exposure to use as a reference point for the HDR merge. Example.

Can't agree more on reading The Design of Everyday Things. I'll have to take a look at The Non Designer's Design Book.

To anyone interested in interface design, I'd also recommend one by the same author, Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, or the book mentioned in the article, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

Those three books were very easy reads and probably taught me more about interface design than the my 3 years at uni. I thoroughly recommend them.

Can't agree more on reading The Design of Everyday Things. I'll have to take a look at The Non Designer's Design Book.

To anyone interested in interface design, I'd also recommend one by the same author, Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, or the book mentioned in the article, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

Those three books were very easy reads and probably taught me more about interface design than the my 3 years at uni. I thoroughly recommend them.

Can't agree more on reading The Design of Everyday Things. I'll have to take a look at The Non Designer's Design Book.

To anyone interested in interface design, I'd also recommend one by the same author, Emotional Design: Why We Love (or Hate) Everyday Things, or the book mentioned in the article, Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art

Those three books were very easy reads and probably taught me more about interface design than the my 3 years at uni. I thoroughly recommend them.