Slashdot Mirror

But really I want to stress that the most important "feature" is that is not Defective By Design: with the Kindle you have to send your PDF or HTML files to Amazon to be converted to the proprietary and DRM'ed format used, which will then only work on a single device, no matter what license you have...

I am not a kindle apologist, but with the DX, that is simply not true. The DX has a built in PDF reader. That's another reason why it's a big deal, and a major advance over the Kindle 2. I think you need to look up the specs for the DX before commenting further, you're clearly confusing it with the Kindle 2 - it is significantly different.

Also, if it can read PDFs natively, that means you can convert pretty much anything to PDF yourself and read it natively. Just get the PDFCreator print driver - volia - DOC, HTML, whatever, will be converted just fine.

As someone who majored in Classics as an undergraduate, I've long been captivated by the massive papyrus finds finds at the Oxyrhynchus site in Egypt. The site has been well-explored for over a century, and many of the papyri have already been deciphered and published. The Biblical texts there have gotten the most attention, but one shouldn't neglect the important literary finds as well. See Bowman's Oxyrhynchus: A City and its Texts for a nice introduction. Over the last few years, there's been more work with using new technologies to examine manuscripts that otherwise can't be deciphered. Classics may seem an unsexy and superseded field, but in fact with digital technology the field is living in exciting times.

There is also the classic 1954 movie, "Them" about giant ants, accidentally created by nuclear testing. It is really a good movie. I am usually bored by most monster movies, but that one is really good. I can not think of a later monster movie of that type, that is nearly as good.

Them

I thought it worth looking at what people are buying at Amazon.com.: In brackets - the number of days in the Top 100.

Bestsellers in Software

1 MS Office Home and Student 2007 [863]
2 Quick Books Pro 2009 [232]
5 Photoshop Elements 7 [253]
8 MS Outlook 2007 [840]
9 Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Standard [273]
13 Photoshop Elements & Premiere Elements 7 [243]
18 MS Offfice Pro 2007 - Full Version [427]
20 Quicken Deluxe 2009 [258]
21 Rosetta Stone Version 3 - Latin American Spanish [325] $494
23 Family Tree Maker 2009 Essentials [247]
25 MS Street & Trips 2009 [234]
34 Corel Video Studio Pro X2 [34]
45 Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 Ultimate [19]
46 Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9 PLatinum Pro Pack [217]
47 Oregon Trail 5 [170]
48 Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 [273]

In sum: the essentials for the MS home office and a broad mix of video and photo editing software for the amateur-enthusiast.

This isn't the market as the geek imagines it.

I'll admit that Rosetta's strength surprised me. I think it's sign of how deeply Hispanic - multilingual, multicultural - this country is on the way to becoming.

It can be very revealing to look at sub-categories like Home & Hobbies. Home design, landscape design, home publishing and other craft projects dominate here.
It's computer aided design for the middle class - a software category I'm not even sure the geek knows exists.

If none of these apps bring your aging PC to its knees, a game certainly can:

Best sellers in PC Games

I thought it worth looking at what people are buying at Amazon.com.: In brackets - the number of days in the Top 100.

Bestsellers in Software

1 MS Office Home and Student 2007 [863]
2 Quick Books Pro 2009 [232]
5 Photoshop Elements 7 [253]
8 MS Outlook 2007 [840]
9 Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Standard [273]
13 Photoshop Elements & Premiere Elements 7 [243]
18 MS Offfice Pro 2007 - Full Version [427]
20 Quicken Deluxe 2009 [258]
21 Rosetta Stone Version 3 - Latin American Spanish [325] $494
23 Family Tree Maker 2009 Essentials [247]
25 MS Street & Trips 2009 [234]
34 Corel Video Studio Pro X2 [34]
45 Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 Ultimate [19]
46 Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9 PLatinum Pro Pack [217]
47 Oregon Trail 5 [170]
48 Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 [273]

In sum: the essentials for the MS home office and a broad mix of video and photo editing software for the amateur-enthusiast.

This isn't the market as the geek imagines it.

I'll admit that Rosetta's strength surprised me. I think it's sign of how deeply Hispanic - multilingual, multicultural - this country is on the way to becoming.

It can be very revealing to look at sub-categories like Home & Hobbies. Home design, landscape design, home publishing and other craft projects dominate here.
It's computer aided design for the middle class - a software category I'm not even sure the geek knows exists.

If none of these apps bring your aging PC to its knees, a game certainly can:

Best sellers in PC Games

I thought it worth looking at what people are buying at Amazon.com.: In brackets - the number of days in the Top 100.

Bestsellers in Software

1 MS Office Home and Student 2007 [863]
2 Quick Books Pro 2009 [232]
5 Photoshop Elements 7 [253]
8 MS Outlook 2007 [840]
9 Dragon Naturally Speaking 10 Standard [273]
13 Photoshop Elements & Premiere Elements 7 [243]
18 MS Offfice Pro 2007 - Full Version [427]
20 Quicken Deluxe 2009 [258]
21 Rosetta Stone Version 3 - Latin American Spanish [325] $494
23 Family Tree Maker 2009 Essentials [247]
25 MS Street & Trips 2009 [234]
34 Corel Video Studio Pro X2 [34]
45 Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 Ultimate [19]
46 Sony Vegas Movie Studio 9 PLatinum Pro Pack [217]
47 Oregon Trail 5 [170]
48 Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2 [273]

In sum: the essentials for the MS home office and a broad mix of video and photo editing software for the amateur-enthusiast.

This isn't the market as the geek imagines it.

I'll admit that Rosetta's strength surprised me. I think it's sign of how deeply Hispanic - multilingual, multicultural - this country is on the way to becoming.

It can be very revealing to look at sub-categories like Home & Hobbies. Home design, landscape design, home publishing and other craft projects dominate here.
It's computer aided design for the middle class - a software category I'm not even sure the geek knows exists.

If none of these apps bring your aging PC to its knees, a game certainly can:

Best sellers in PC Games

See also Men Against The Desert, explaining how an area in Western Canada several times the size of Texas was turned from grassland into desert by grazing and farming with wet-land techniques on dry-land/desert terrain. The gigantic desert (nothing but sand, giant dunes, an actual desert) was turned back into incredibly productive farmland (a breadbasket area) through the development of dry-farming techniques such as trash fallowing, and the judicious application of seeding programs, fences, and careful land management. What was an uninhabitable desert nearly 100 years ago now provides a considerable surplus of grain.

Much like Nigeria (now a desert) used to be a breadbasket for northern Africa.

So yes, the desert sucks, and was caused by people screwing up land management, but it can also be restored. The problem is that the local governments aren't really stable enough to handle that sort of long-term project. Canada proved that people can, in a desert-rainfall area, turn lifeless sand into vibrant farming or grassland. There's hope.

Nobody will pay for content that used to be free.

Says who?

I suspect TFA is connected with the publication of "Frontiers in Propulsion Science", a sort-of summary of the work of the NASA Breakthrough Propulsion Physics project:
http://www.amazon.com/Frontiers-Propulsion-Progress-Astronautics-Aeronautics/dp/1563479567

See also
http://tauzero.aero/

Cool. I stand corrected.

But while the Classmate is more powerfull and thus more flexible, it does weigh more than 3 times as much as a Kindle 2. Kindle 2 is 0.64 lbs, Classmate is listed at $352 at Amazon ($499 list price)
Kindle: $359 at Amazon
iRex DRS: $933 at iRex's shop

That iRex is insanely expensive ... heh

I actually find a kernel of hope in this particular deal

What deal, this treaty? Or appointing an IP czar?

I would like them to take their time to really understand the issues. They certainly haven't explored these issues too deepy in the past

The issues of IP has been studied. For instance here's a link to some Independent studies of Copyright Term Extension. The Commission On Intellectual Property has more. Amazon sells the book "Intellectual Property (Studies in International Economics), published in 2003. Google has a preview of the book "The economics of intellectual property in a world without frontiers: A Study of Computer Software".

Falcon

If you are interested in this type of thing, I suggest listening to the FIB podcast interviewing Michio Kaku or read his book Physics of the Impossible , which also discusses teleportation.

I will not pay that price as long as books are cheap

I think you don't understand the benefit this will have on many people. But here I just wanted to point out how cheap books are compared to Kindle stuff:

• Japan's Contested War Memories: The 'Memory Rifts' in Historical Consciousness of World War II (Paperback): $37.73
• Same book, Kindle edition: $142.88

What the crap? A 375% markup on the Kindle version!

The Kindle version isn't cheaper. It's more expensive!

I will not pay that price as long as books are cheap

I think you don't understand the benefit this will have on many people. But here I just wanted to point out how cheap books are compared to Kindle stuff:

• Japan's Contested War Memories: The 'Memory Rifts' in Historical Consciousness of World War II (Paperback): $37.73
• Same book, Kindle edition: $142.88

What the crap? A 375% markup on the Kindle version!

The Kindle version isn't cheaper. It's more expensive!

No. Sorry, I know that makes all the sense in the world, except strangely that's not how it works.

Ok, so here's another really strange part: any point in space can be thought of as the "stationary center" of the big bang. When you ask "where did the big bang happen?" any point in space will serve just as well as the place. And that's not because we don't know where the location is, it's because all the points in space used to be in the same place, which was the center of the big bang. Space itself expanded.

So anyway, (and this is not talking about the big bang, but just normal physics now) imagine you're sitting on Earth and you watch two spaceships, each going in opposite directions at 99.9999% the speed of light, then after a year each will be approximately 1 light year away from you, making them 2 light years apart. However, in the same situation, if you're sitting on either spaceship, then after a year the other spaceship will only be 1 light year away.

Crazy, I know. Want to know why? Read this book.

Smidge207 didn't write the above review. It was copied directly from an Amazon review that he had absolutely nothing to do with. He does this regularly and shouldn't be modded up for it.

or check this out http://www.amazon.com/LeapFrog-Turbo-Extreme/dp/B000246LXE

Slight retraction, while according to what everyone is saying broadband internet is free on the device, according to Amazon's terms of service they can charge you for it. http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=kin2w_ddp?nodeId=200144530&#wireless

So they may someday start charging for non amazon access.

And now for the real question everyone is asking:

Can you get porn on it?

Yes you can:

http://www.amazon.com/kamasutra/dp/B001C83O16/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241633173&sr=8-1

:P

Liquify what?

Their lawyers? Chief Officers?

A blender would do a great job.

But then, their crumminess just might take over whoever drink the mixture...kinda like what has happened with UF's CrudPuppy a few times.

How close does this leap make us to cloning dinosaurs which then break loose in an orgy of violence and destruction a la Jurassic Park ?

So just get a frigging Sony Ebook Reader for like 200 bucks that works with any PDF file.

I took a corrective exercise course and went looking for Grays Anatomy and discovered that most people now are using Frank Netter's Atlas http://www.amazon.com/Atlas-Human-Anatomy-Frank-Netter/dp/0914168819 I would say it is a classic, illustrations are drawn by hand. Some samples: http://www.netterimages.com/

I suggest the New Organon by Francis Bacon. This edition seems to be available for the Kindle.

Or how about even Aristotle's Physics? That's a nice book to read if you've never read any Aristotle or even any philosophy before. Bacon in the New Organon was trying to advocate a new method of science against the Aristotelian tradition.

And it probably cannot be called a classic, but Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions would probably be interesting to you. And as a foil to Kuhn's work, Popper's Conjectures and Refutations.

On the Shoulders of Giants was a book I picked up on the cheap ... a weighty tome assembled by Stephen Hawking of classic books of science (some of which you listed).

I think I got the hardcover for ~$8 at a used bookstore. Amazon seems to indicate it's not available on the kindle but here's what's in it:

1. Nicolaus Copernicus "On the Revolutions of [the] Heavenly Spheres" (1543)

2. Galileo Galilei "Dialogues [or Discourses and Mathematical Demonstrations] Concerning Two [New] Sciences" (1638)

3. Johannes Kepler Book Five of "Harmonies of the World" (1618)

4. Sir Isaac Newton "The Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy" (1687)

5. Albert Einstein "The Principles of Relativity: A Collection of Original Papers on the Special Theory of Relativity" (1922)

To be honest, I hadn't even heard of this. This article says the very first cartridges just became available at the end of last year. Amazon has them but it looks they all come from one company (the one mentioned in the article I linked) and I couldn't find any reviews or comments. I did notice that as far as I can tell they are the only company selling soy based toner cartridges and they only sell them for HP right now - though I guess they plan to add others in the future. That may solve your issue right there though, unless you own the right printers.
 
Interestingly enough the link in TFA doesn't seem to point to a company that does anything other than refurbish and refill toner cartridges with regular toner. Maybe I'm missing something but I don't see a thing about soy based toner. I'm sure someone will point me in the right direction on that if I'm mistaken.
 
So I'd be interested as well in hearing if anyone has actually used this yet, but unless it has been an immediate disaster it doesn't seem that enough time has passed to tell how well it is going to work.

Here's some -isms for you...

I fear progressive authoritarianism operating under the guise of a liberal democracy. I fear those who would tear down our current society to enforce a raw democracy, guided by the "enlightened" elite, using propaganda via the media to steer the masses, creating a perception of "have-nots" so they can hate those that don't like where the system is taking us. Those that don't follow are run over; it's not a new concept, after all, these tactics have been around since "Philip Dru: Administrator", 1917.

We're being steered away from the republic, because a republic represents the freedom to get away from bad decisions made by others. "Why do we need an electoral congress when we can just let the people decide?" No... we have a democracy where you only need a majority to decide that someone else should pay for what you want, a fear that the Founding Fathers voiced often. There's a reason why they call it a progressive tax code, such that today 90% of the public pays 30% of the federal tax. Our "closing the loophoole" will end up chasing away the 10% that actually generates the cash for our society.

We have the media in league with the POTUS, in 100 days reporting favorable stories in a 2:1 ratio over the last president, yes 42% vs 20% favorably biased stories. And it's just not NBC or CNN... They steer the national conversations, and under the guise of entertainment (ComedyCentral, of Viacom, which lest we forget owned CBS up until 2006), they ridicule those that don't fall in line with their political ideology. John Stewart rips apart Cramer thanks to his NYSE executive brother, then falls back on "I'm just an entertainer" when his beliefs are cornered...

It's not socialism, no, because at least there they told you up front that the system was being run by the elite to forcefully equate the masses, except for those at the top of course. It's not fascism this time around either, because under fascism the corporations run the government, when today the government is itching to run the corporations (another $4.5 billion 1 hour ago). It's authoritarianism, chipping away our freedoms, our options, our future. Spending money they don't have today, telling us what we can't believe, then using the 1920's progressive tactics of criticising and ridiculing the non-believers.

Congratulations on missing the point congress. (surprise)

Forbes had a great piece on this a few months ago. People aren't going to Ireland / the Caymans because they don't want to pay taxes and just want to cheat... the cost of compliance is too high.

One of the good things Regan was supposed to have done was get lots of tax money back to the US by simplifying our tax code. Even though they may have brought their money back from countries with lower tax burdens, it was easier to have it in the US.

There is an opportunity cost to moving your money to another country or using a tax shelter (legal or not). People judge it worth it because of what they have to go through.

If you simply simplify the tax code so it's not so hard to deal with, people will come back. Things have only gotten worse recently with SarbOx. Closing loopholes is trying to tie the arms of suicidal people to beds. It works much better to try to get them to stop being suicidal.

There will always be people who try to cheat the system because they are immoral jerks. But if it doesn't take wealthy people a team of 30 tax attorneys to keep their wealth in line, they're more likely to keep it in the US and avoid the hassle of all the international laws (and spending 183 days of the year out of the country, and blah blah blah). No tax breaks for pork farmers on 17-35 acres in areas that don't observe daylight savings time unless they grow at least 3% barley ethanol using sustainable methods.

The problem is complexity in the tax code, not tax shelters.

Example way to fix things.

Tramiel didn't get it, he was in the right place at the right time with a specific idea. I recently finished reading On The Edge, a book all about Commodore (warning: ref link, since I copied it off my site).

Basically Tramiel was doing what he did in the calculator business, the one thing he always did: he pushed for lower prices. This was over the objections of the engineers and such.

With the PET and C64 it was a huge hit. The market wanted something like that.

Tramiel also decided to QUADRUPLE the RAM in the C64, which really helped it.

But later he wanted to compete with Sinclair and have a sub $100 computer. He didn't care about higher end computers, he was still selling calculators (price is everything). This was when the market wanted an improved C64. He didn't get it, he just wanted something cheaper still. Marketing didn't even want to touch some of their products (Vic20?) because they were afraid they'd upset their success.

When computers became more common and people started having a good investment in software (instead of just one program or writing their own BASIC stuff), people wanted backwards compatibility instead of having to throw away their $750 software investment. But that didn't fit with the "make a cheaper computer again" philosophy. Calculators didn't have that kind of issue, each one was a stand alone sale. Computers stopped working like that, and Tramiel didn't get it.

It was a REALLY good book if you are interested in this kind of stuff. How Commodore came up, how some people continually made decisions that basically sunk the company (the CFO, who's name escapes me). How they got lucky, how they nearly messed it up, how they lost it, how they almost got it back. A great story.

If you remember, the most expensive bottle of wine in the world was fake. Ben Wallace wrote a great book about how the world's top oenophiles were taken by a charlatan. I'm sure the same thing can happen with Scotch. The labs used the same dating techniques described here.

If you never reinvent the wheel, you do not get any better wheels.

Very true. The question is whether it's worth the investment at a given time, and whether the guy who's designing the navigation system needs to know about it.

Rather, remove non-thinking academically trained compiler monkeys from the loop,

I think you missed the point widely here.

The point is not that I don't want to have to think. It's that I don't want to have to think about such inane, minute, insignificant details as memory allocation, when I should instead be thinking about things which are actually important to my application. Like, oh, business logic.

As for throwing more hardware at it, that's just a crutch. I've already seen some competitors of mine collapse because they ran into situations where a doubling of the hardware only lead to 10% improved performance.

Guessing they didn't design for horizontal scalability.

You're right, performance must be considered at the beginning. However, the details we're talking about -- again, memory allocation -- are a vertical scalability problem. Not wholly unimportant, but secondary to horizontal scalability -- mostly because you can always buy more hardware (and space, power, and cooling), even on demand, while you cannot always count on Moore's Law to provide you with a faster CPU, and when you can, it gets progressively more expensive for the performance you get.

Yes, tweaking malloc and free, and tuning for performance, all helps with vertical scalability, which means fewer servers to buy. That is a good thing, and I am not disputing it.

However, this eventually runs into the physical limitations -- if there is a theoretically most efficient algorithm, there is also a theoretical maximum for how much load any one server can handle.

And having things be modular, flexible, maintainable, even stable and portable, are all things that can help with horizontal scalability.

The time to consider vertical scalability, and that two weeks of extra programmer time, and squeezing out even 20 or 30%, is once you already have a product, and some traffic, and you're looking to cut down on operating costs. Because done right, that's all you'll be doing -- spending a little less on hosting.

I'd actually go so far as to say that most companies have a waste approaching 50% when you actually analyze how much flooring space is used, how much power, how much cooling, how much unnecessary cabling.

Now, compare the expense there with a typical programmer salary. Sometimes it's worth it, sometimes it's not.

long-term thinking has, just like in economy, been told to "go to hell", for short-term comfort.

What happened to this, then?

Modularity and flexibility is evaluated for necessity at this stage too. Not all software needs to be either of those.

In the long term, all sufficiently complex software needs to either be both of those, or be eventually replaced with something which is.

We've read recently about Twitter looking at replacing some things with Scala -- being able to replace part of your software with something written in an entirely different language is pretty damned flexible.

In the short term, deliver or die. And I'll deliver a hell of a lot faster with Ruby than you will with C. And Twitter again illustrates this -- call them lazy, call them unreliable, but you can't call them unsuccessful, and they now have the cash to do something about the other two.

Actually, it's not. Even taking VAT into account, prices for software in Europe is drastically higher than it is in the US. VAT in the UK is 15% flat rate (down from 17.5% a few months ago).

Proof? Look at:
http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Windows-Vista-Home-Premium/dp/B0015CCFLE/ref=sr_1_10?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1241452273&sr=1-10
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Windows-Vista-Home-Premium-Service/dp/B0013O54OE/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=software&qid=1241452166&sr=8-2

The UK version is the equivalent of $203 dollars, the US version $139. That makes the UK version 46% more expensive- more than 3 times the rate of VAT.

"What occurred to me is that if there were an interest larger than government that could get Microsoft to change its ways and fix its stuff, it would be "big money." I wonder if big money has even considered this?"

Yes, they have. It is called a security landscape. Banks calculate that it is cheaper to allow the fraud and compensate than implement security measures that would stop the problem. You can read more about this if you want to know.

Disclaimer: I am not Bruce Schneier, nor do I play him on Slashdot.

"Also it is used to make them obey authority and brain wash them to cultural "moral standards"."

You might take a long, hard look at your hypothesis, as the school system is essentially a liberal enclave.

And how are his points exclusive from yours?

Moral standards are the PC world we live in today.

As for obeying authority - many of the most authoritarian states have been essentially liberal in nature.

... but somehow we keep creating.

The problem is that we don't want to trust people in authority to make decisions, so we come up with a process or committee or something to ensure that one person can't make the hard decisions. But time and time again, it's shown that if no one can make hard decisions, no one will.

And while it's probably going to beat the hell out of my karma for it, I recommend The Death of Common Sense, by Philip K. Howard. It basically goes into examples of how our unwavering belief that a legal processes can sort through the mess impartially causes all sorts of unexpected results.

As soon as the authority to make a decision is lost, how can bad behavior be punished?

Yes, after years of selling you DRM-infested music, Apple was one of the first* to ask to be able to sell without DRM so that they could re-sell you the same music, thus milking you for every penny as the GP said.

*By "one of the first", I mean "third or fourth out of the six or seven large downloadable music stores". EMusic, Amazon and others all offered DRM-free music before the Apple iTunes store.

If you don't know, it's because Android is just a single word that's been in the modern language for a couple of generations now. Apparently there are laws against somebody absconding with single words of our language and claiming sole ownership of them. Of course the courts are slow and stupid, so anyone fighting this will have to pay lots of lawyers lots of money before getting this crushed, but at least Google has that cash.

Right. That's why trademarks are never granted for single words like target or Amazon. Because there are laws against it.

Here are two sources to give you a start.
The Art of Electronics
Neets

While the rise of Al Qaeda and the need to keep on top of terrorist networks helped put the NSA in the spotlight, the scope of its interception capabilities has expanded regardless of the threat of terrorism. James Bamford's Body of Secrets charts the rise of massive interception in the 1990s and links much of the NSA's activity to economic espionage against foreign businesses, as Clinton wanted to "level the playing field." The NSA was just returning to the happy-go-lucky violation of privacy for the gain of a few that Carter put at bay in the 1970s.

Certainly there's been plenty of ink spilled about how a more serious attempt to stop Al Qaeda would involve greater human intelligence, but the CIA found its clandestine services cut just as the NSA became favoured.

I've just cruised through this list of netbooks over at Amazon. It returned just over 5,000 results and I can't find one without a camera. I'll keep looking but this leads me to believe that you may just need to look at a regular laptop. And the wait is probably going to exist otherwise because you are obviously looking for something that is just outside the norm for these.
 
  This discussion from last September didn't turn up anything, except the Mini 9 - which you already mention. Though they do bring up one option that I think is the best bet; to open up the case, yank the camera and fill in the spot where it went. It can't be that hard. If some guy can fit an LCD behind the apple logo - you can get the camera out.
 
The phone issue I find being brought up going back to 2005 and it's probably older - this seemed to offer hope and mentions a few models but it's old and I'm not sure how stuff would have carried forward. Most stuff I find mentions Blackberry which you already have. So my guess is that there is no treasure trove of camera free devices that you have missed. You are just in a tough spot.

i always install the latest LTS version of ubuntu

I've been wanting to install Ubuntu on my Mac, and almost bought the book "Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux (Versions 8.10 and 8.04), A (2nd Edition)" last night. Unfortunately one of the reasons I want to install a Linux distro is to run CinePaint but it was dropped from Ubuntu. Unless I can find a way to install CinePaint I don't think I'll install Ubuntu.

Falcon

Neither of those were covered in any CS class I attended. Seriously; CS classes don't teach every algorithm ever invented.

Wow, now I'm frightened by CS programs. When I went to college in twenty years ago (at UW-Madison in 1989), I took a basic programming class in my first semester and a very elementary "introduction to algorithms" class in my second semester that used the wonderful CLR(S) book.

Sure we spent more time analyzing bubble sort and quick sort as O(N^2) and O(N Lg N) sorts but at least we covered the concept of O(N) sorting. I can't believe that a current introductory algorithms class wouldn't even mention O(N) sorting algorithms -- especially since counting sort and radix sort are both trivially easy to implement.

How is it that CS students are graduating now without learning concepts that were considered basic enough to teach in an introductory freshman class when I went to school? Then again, maybe our college CS programs have gone that far downhill. The kid mentioned didn't even *BELIEVE* that O(N) sorting *EXISTED* !!!

Pocket Ref, third addition, by "Thomas J Glover", pages 460-473...

I had it on my within-hand's-reach shelf. Includes squares, cubes, and roots. Unbelievable, I was just wondering how far back I'd have to search to find printed lookup tables within a published book.
Apparently this one's still going strong.

My dad has been a long time fan of Apple and is a proud owner of a Macbook Pro (brand new, March last year). Before that he had a PowerBook G4.
The G4 and the bluetooth Apple mouse he got with it died about the same time. He never really liked the Apple mouse. It felt cheap and clackety and didn't fit his hand right. He does like having that second mouse button.

It was around that time I wanted to buy a present for my dad and looked into getting a mouse that was bluetooth and kinda fit the Mac theme and didn't take up a USB slot. So I got my dad a white V470 bluetooth mouse. It was even advertised in the store as being Mac friendly.
That mouse was horrible. It never gave the correct amount of battery charge and you pretty much couldn't tell if it was turned on or not. I kept swapping out batteries on it and it greatly annoyed my dad who just wanted to get on with his work. I never figured out if it was a fault with the mouse or the Macbook but it never remembered it's pairing. Everytime the Macbook was booted up, the mouse had to be manually paired again as if it was a new mouse. I recommend that no one here ever look twice at a V470. My dad ended up using a cheap little Taiwanese corded mouse with flashy LEDs I got for free from some store offer.

A couple of months later my dad's original Apple Bluetooth Keyboard also died. So we decided to look into getting a wireless combo deal. This time, we didn't try for bluetooth. We looked at RF. We went for the Microsoft Wireless Laser Keyboard 6000 V2.0. It was on a heavily discounted offer price and initially we were just focused on the big chunky mouse.
Turns out to be a really nice product. It's a big full-size keyboard, nice rubbery wrist rest and came with some extra function keys that are perfect for my dad. There's zoom-in and zoom-out buttons on the side that work globally and are especially useful for websites with small writing. No more hunting for the options in Firefox or Safari. The OS also recognized the big pair of volume controls above the function keys making it much easier to change volume.
The chunky mouse is perfect for my dad. My only gripe is that for some reason, the polling or DPI isn't handled correctly and so the mouse pointer moves half the speed it usually does for a given setting. So right now, the pointer speed is maxed out in the system preferences and it's just a tad too slow....but my dad has gotten used to it now. Again, I have no idea if this a fault in the mouse or the Macbook.

Hmm, haven't had a problem with 10.5 yet.

Last night, er today, I finished reinstalling Leopard. I went into an Apple store Monday because Finder kept on freezing on me. There a genius at the bar did a couple of things then suggested I reinstall Leopard. When he did specifically told me that when I do to partition to hardrive first, as a simple reinstall wouldn't delete all the files. So I went ahead and created 3 partitions. Actually I created 3 and formated them then deleted then all before reforming then creating 3 new ones. So now on my 320 GB hdd, which I had installed to replace the 160 GB disk my laptop came with, has 2 partitions 30 GB each with the rest taking up the third partition. I installed Leopard on the first. The second one, 238 GB, I set as the home or user partition. And the third partition I plan to use for Ubuntu. Actually now that I think of it I may go out tonight after sending my slashdot replies to pick up a Ubuntu disk. I think I'll get "Practical Guide to Ubuntu Linux (Versions 8.10 and 8.04), A (2nd Edition). Barnes and Noble has it on sale for $35, regular price is $50. It comes with a live dvd so I can try Ubuntu before installing it. Then I'll also order it from Amazon, because they have it a few dollars cheaper, and then it arrives take it to B&N as a return.

However before I install Ubuntu I want to make sure I have a plan mapped out on exactly how to install it, including what happens if a problem comes to dinner.

I left out the server version because I will guess that most regular home user is going to use the server version

Actually I'd think most people who install Ubuntu would install the desktop version, maybe that's what you meant as well, because I can't see most people wanting to run a server.

With MS you have 'home regular', 'home better' 'home ultimate' 'business regular' 'business super-awesome'. (Something like that, having fun).

While Ubuntu doesn't have as many versions in one way, desktop or server, in another way it has more versions. There's Ubuntu, Kubuntu, Edubuntu, Studio, and others with different window managers or desktops as well as 32 bit and 64 bit versions.

Not sure which side you are falling on, but I still think MS keeps shoving out unfinished products out the door for more moeny.

In a way I agree. MS releases new stuff before it's ready. But then it releases service packs to fix whatever. Get the software on as many computers as quickly as possible then fix bugs. That's not really much different than some Linux distros though, look at Ubuntu. Canonical decided to release 2 major releases a year. Last year they were 8.04 and 8.10. So far this year we have 9.04. I noticed it isn't labeled as an LTS, Long Term Support which offers 3 years support instead of 18 months, whereas 8.04 was so I guess this tyme 9.10 will be LTS.

Oh, as far as MS goes, as I've said on ./ and elsewhere I don't like Microsoft. However I don't wish they were gone. I want more competition not less, and with a smaller MS there would be more.

Falcon

See also Unlocking the Sky by Seth Shulman. It's a fascinating account of Glenn Curtiss, who in many ways did more to create the modern airplane than the Wright Brothers. For example, Curtiss invented ailerons; the Wrights by contrast had a difficult to control system that physically twisted the wings. But the Wright patents prevented Curtiss from selling his planes, and it was only military intervention that got the market moving.

This book will reinforce any ill feelings you may have toward the patent system.

My plan is to use basic wood mulch on top to weigh it down with a few large rocks here and there.

I found it on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B001E01E2I

I used to own a couple of programming books (Undocumented DOS: http://www.amazon.com/Undocumented-DOS-Programmers-Functions-Structures/dp/0201570645 and a similar Windows one). That's how I learned about hidden OS APIs Microsoft provided (and used internally even though we "normal" programmers weren't supposed to -- can't find the link, but there were lawsuits over it). I almost never used the information, but the books provided some really good insight that made be a better programmer in the long run. However, knowing that these interupts or APIs were liable to disappear with an OS upgrade, it was still sometimes necessary to use them to accomplish a task (within certain restrictions). You would just have to rewrite code when the next OS came out.

Lenovo makes a similar trackpoint/trackpad USB keyboard that's compact, but still quite usable and with built-in mouse capabilities.

I personnaly own a Logitech MX900 it does come with a usb pluggable pod/receiver but it is fully bluetooth compliant. I never pugged the pod's usb cable anywhere, just the power cord to recharge the mouse. And it has always worked flawlessly.

http://www.amazon.com/Logitech-MX900-Bluetooth-Cordless-Optical/dp/B0000CEPDF