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Oh and also this book is great:

http://www.amazon.com/Euler-Master-Dolciani-Mathematical-Expositions/dp/0883853280

You don't need much knowledge (A-Level knowledge in the UK) but there are so many wonderful results proved in it!

You should definitely expose your students to the following Math books:

http://www.amazon.com/Math-SAT-800-Toughest-Problems/dp/1439200068/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234132532&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Math-Workbook-New-SAT-Barrons/dp/0764123653/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234132532&sr=1-2
http://www.amazon.com/Petersons-Math-Exercises-Academic-Preparation/dp/0768908078/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234132532&sr=1-7

You should definitely expose your students to the following Math books:

http://www.amazon.com/Math-SAT-800-Toughest-Problems/dp/1439200068/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234132532&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Math-Workbook-New-SAT-Barrons/dp/0764123653/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234132532&sr=1-2
http://www.amazon.com/Petersons-Math-Exercises-Academic-Preparation/dp/0768908078/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234132532&sr=1-7

You should definitely expose your students to the following Math books:

http://www.amazon.com/Math-SAT-800-Toughest-Problems/dp/1439200068/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234132532&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Math-Workbook-New-SAT-Barrons/dp/0764123653/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234132532&sr=1-2
http://www.amazon.com/Petersons-Math-Exercises-Academic-Preparation/dp/0768908078/ref=sr_1_7?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234132532&sr=1-7

CF was a hoax spread by the science illiterate and greedy media.

Pons & Fleischman were deluded. Scientists were unimpressed then. They still are.

LENR-CANR? Research articles? Yawn. Wake me up when a real journal publishes anything on "LENR."

http://www.amazon.com/Voodoo-Science-Road-Foolishness-Fraud/dp/0195147103/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1234120041&sr=8-1

Your point would make sense if no one charged however there are plenty of distributions that charge, including ubuntu.

Merry Christmas

One of the best damn games on the Wii.

HE may not be married but I AM and can tell you if your wife convinced you to let her call you things like "paranoid idiot" then you CLEARLY are too socially inept to be married. Your wife knows this and is capitalizing on it.

Nobody keeps a verbally abusive friend around unless they don't value themselves, let alone lets them become their spouse. I'm sorry you were not able to handle this but YOUR failure to stand up for yourself does not mean HIS advice is incorrect-- in fact it is quite the opposite; I had to go through a similar phase with my wife, and now lead an 8-week counseling course twice per year for men like Abreu and yourself, who finally gave up and convinced themselves this was part of marriage.

It was hard at first, but just as he said, they respect you more for it afterwords. I've since counseled 16 men through similar situations in the last 4 years and their marriages have all improved greatly.

I would recommend you start with this book if you haven't completely given up hope yet; this is the first thing we read together in the 8-week course.

Best of wishes~

Read Inside the AS/400 by Frank Soltis (or a more recent edition) and you can see exactly how they did all these things starting with the System/38 in the 1970s.

You don't have to have multiple address spaces. Heck even the first Linux kernels just used one huge address space with each process getting a 64MB chunk of that.

The System/38, AS/400 and whatever they call it this week has always had persistent "objects". They are named but they aren't files although if you squint hard enough you could claim they similar enough. Phantom is only 30 years late in claiming to be the first.

The advantage to using a VM is that code above the VM is insulated from changes below the VM. For example the very first System/38 program will still run today and in all that time they have gone through several generations of processors including changing from CISC to RISC and changing address sizes. You can still have C and assembler but they target a virtual environment rather than a concrete one with the OS doing the right thing at run time.

If you use Gnome, you probably just have to open the volume control panel and enable the "headphone sensing" switch.

I set up an nc10 with Ubuntu Netbook Remix for a good friend and it's a great little machine, indeed. The battery life is amazing (with the new battery I got 6 hours of battery out of it while *constantly working on it* and having Wifi running)

The screen rotation feature in Gnome is fantastic. I set up a keyboard shortcut to switch the screen to portrait orientation. Since the coordinate system is not rotated for an external mouse, you can still use it as usual. In portrait mode you can comfortably read 12pt font on letter format full-page.

To make portrait mode really usable and part of everyday use of the netbook I recommend Samsung's UM10 mouse or similar. The UM10 has a nifty scroll wheel that works great, though the UM10's form-factor makes it pretty shitty as a mouse pointer. But the important thing is that it is tiny and uses USB, so that you can always have it attached and ready to use.

The page-up/down buttons need some fiddling to make them work in X, though, and I did not yet get around to that. There are tutorials for setting up multi-button mice on the web.

http://amazon.com?referral_id=037328861

The final date will be December 21, 2012.

Actually in Australia the switch off year is in 2013, however DTV has been available since 2001 and the take-up rate has been significant however there will still be many who won't make the switch until the standard TV broadcast is finally switched off.

No...

Upgrade from XP to Home Premium: $70

And several months before Vista came out, you got free upgrade coupons redeemable for upgrade from XP to Home Premium.

Compare to Apple... I get a Mac.. 30 days later 10.5.x comes out, and my software's obsolete and not updatable, when it's only a month old, and there's already lots of software out the brand new machine won't run.

Most sane software vendors will include some duration of free upgrades when you purchase your OS, but not these two...

Sorry, this is definitely something Microsoft's OEMs do better than Apple.

Hypothetical: $1200 Macbook comes with Leopard. I buy Snow-leopard for $130 next year. I paid $400 Windows7 and put it on my $700 Dell.

The upgrade version of Windows Vista Ultimate costs $160 at Amazon.com, so I expect an upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate to cost at most $200. If you don't need "enterprise features" and don't need to join a domain, an upgrade to Vista Home Premium costs $90.

And before you complain about Windows "upgrade" prices vs OS X "full" prices, your hypothetical $700 Dell presumably has a previous version of Windows on it, as does your hypothetical MacBook (or any Apple computer that meets Snow Leopard's system requirements). Also, "upgrade" versions of Windows allow "clean" installs (format and install). You don't need to do a potentially flaky "in place upgrade."

Hypothetical: $1200 Macbook comes with Leopard. I buy Snow-leopard for $130 next year. I paid $400 Windows7 and put it on my $700 Dell.

The upgrade version of Windows Vista Ultimate costs $160 at Amazon.com, so I expect an upgrade to Windows 7 Ultimate to cost at most $200. If you don't need "enterprise features" and don't need to join a domain, an upgrade to Vista Home Premium costs $90.

And before you complain about Windows "upgrade" prices vs OS X "full" prices, your hypothetical $700 Dell presumably has a previous version of Windows on it, as does your hypothetical MacBook (or any Apple computer that meets Snow Leopard's system requirements). Also, "upgrade" versions of Windows allow "clean" installs (format and install). You don't need to do a potentially flaky "in place upgrade."

The final date will be December 21, 2012.

You're certainly right about what we know now... but saying science will never answer these questions is equally just an assertion. Certainly there's a lot of scientific thinking about why the Universe exists and what could've caused it. I'd thoroughly recommend reading The Goldilocks Enigma, which takes these theories as well as the God hypothesis, and follows each to its logical conclusion... going to re-read it once my mate's done with my copy :)

I know you're being funny, but interestingly, in most (maybe all) states, you can not carry a sword or long knife in any way that would make it useful for protection. As a country, we have decided that firearms are much safer than swords. Here are a couple of links for discussions of this: http://askville.amazon.com/NYC-legal-carry-pocket-knife-attached-belt-plain-sight-concealed-weapon/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=9649382 http://askville.amazon.com/legal-carry-sword-self-defense/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=8859178

I know you're being funny, but interestingly, in most (maybe all) states, you can not carry a sword or long knife in any way that would make it useful for protection. As a country, we have decided that firearms are much safer than swords. Here are a couple of links for discussions of this: http://askville.amazon.com/NYC-legal-carry-pocket-knife-attached-belt-plain-sight-concealed-weapon/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=9649382 http://askville.amazon.com/legal-carry-sword-self-defense/AnswerViewer.do?requestId=8859178

Private investment in space flight seemed so likely in the 1990s. I remember science fiction author Michael Flynn's future history starting with Firestar suggesting that FedEx would be a major force behind space flight because deliveries could be made anywhere on Earth in much less time than with airplanes. Nowadays, however, no company is going to want to spend that much money on courier services, and with the present economic crisis there's not much investment in anything.

It's a real shame that companies presently developing private space vehicles are more concerned with just getting people far up enough to enjoy freefall (for dumb prices) instead of really looking towards space.

Do they know how to read? As much as I am glad to see their new MS-repeatfuckup, I wish we had fewer distros of linux. And, irony of ironies, probably the same people going HAHAHAHA here are to be found in the recent post where prophet Linus declared that billions of distros were greatest thing around on the monkeysphere.

If you want the long answer to that, read Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy.

It's eye opening, and it explains how tiered pricing works to maximize sales and profit.

Basically, the lower/crippled versions of the product are sold below production cost while the top versions pay a hefty premium -- the users which need the most features are subsidizing those who don't need them because those who don't need the features wouldn't buy the product for the original price.

Usually this is done in order to increase sales, and thus, make production runs benefit from scale. For example, when Intel made their Pentiums with and without a mathematical co-processor. Actually all the processors had a math co-processor, just that the lower versions had the connections to that part of the silicon cut by laser :-)

In the case of software it's similar -- the development costs are fixed, so you will try to sell as many copies as possible. The more you sell, the lower is the price of production per copy.

You may think this is a crappy system, but it actually works in everybody's favour: instead of producing 1000 units of a specialized product, the manufacturer can produce 100,000. The people who can't afford, or don't want full features have a product available for them, while the rich, or those who really need the features pay less for the product than they would for a specialized version.

The games there are windows-only. Please tag as "windowsonly" so the Linux, BSD & Mac OS loving fellow slashdotters will know that they should skip this slashvertisment.

Here are the Linux games:
http://www.amazon.com/Linux-Systems-Games/b/qid=1233752310/ref=sr_tc_img_2_0?ie=UTF8&node=290573

I don't know how much I'll use the service later on, but I've already grabbed the free games. Incidentally, there's a fourth free game available; Big Kahuna Reef. It's not advertised, as far as I can tell, so I don't know if there might be more hiding in the pages.

why would a USB external hard drive be any less reliable than an internal SATA drive?

Because you're probably moving it around more. External USB 3.5" hard drives rarely have anything close to decent shock protection, so it's fundamentally less secure that the drive buried in the guts of the PC. Even if it's just sitting on your desk 100% of the time if it accidentally gets knocked off your desk its MUCH more likely to fail than the one buried in the guts of the desktop. And because its a lot smaller it's more likely to get knocked off.

So it's nothing "inherent", it's tied to the usage pattern.

It's also worth noting that I live in earthquake country so I'm more sensitive to this issue than most. For example, I don't care much about lightning strikes but they might be a major issue where you're located.

we're a small indie label, so i'm not sure the cost of an external RAID enclosure is justified. we do have a lot of hi-res graphics to back up, such as album artwork, print layouts, poster/sticker/clothing designs, etc., as well as e-mails, invoices, and our retail & radio mailing/contact lists. but i think weekly backups onto one or two 750GB~1TB drives should be sufficient.

Is $250 too much? http://www.amazon.com/Buffalo-Technology-LS-W1-0TGL-R1-LinkStation/dp/B000ZPIMN2/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top
The Linkstation is pretty heavy, but it's still too small and delicate for my tastes. I'd secure it somehow.

Full disclosure: I worked on the predecessor to this product.

i'd prefer if they were FireWire, but it's still a heck of a lot better than trying to do backups over the network.

My Gigabit network is actually faster than USB for file transfers. I have very fast gear though, so YMMV. Speed is definitely an issue.

don't forget Norstrilia http://www.amazon.com/Norstrilia-Cordwainer-Smith/dp/0915368617/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233709564&sr=8-2
also see http://www.cordwainer-smith.com/
IMHO some of the best ... ..-. stories ever written

Actually it's Rapture for the Geeks, which just happens to be what I'm currently reading. Good call.

Indeed, it's sad how little knowledge there is of amateur radio among nerds these days. Part of that is the medium itself, where you're often essentially talking with bored middle-aged men about nothing (international regulations arguably forbidding interesting discussions). However, there's no better way to gain an understanding of electronics than through studying for an amateur radio license. If you start with a guide like the ARRL intro , electronic gadgets become a lot less mysterious and it gets better as you proceed up the license classes. You can diagnose television or mobile phone problems, repair simple devices, or build your own for cheap like audio amplifiers. I haven't used amateur radio in over a decade now, but I'm still really happy that I got into it.

I find Greg Bear's novel Eon more thought-provoking in this case. In Bear's universe, myriad intelligent species in the universe live together and trade peacefully in a shared tunnel through space-time. Along comes an aggressive species that tries to wipe out of them out. Ironically, this aggressive species believes that in killing other civilizations (by "storing" them), it is preserving knowledge for the future. An alien species that does ill to other species wouldn't necessary be self-centered or malevolent, but their values could be quite different from ours.

Seems to be true.

Here: http://promos.asus.com/US/1000HE/ASUS/index.html

And pre-order on Amazon, for $374, this spec:

ASUS Eee PC 1000HE 10-Inch Netbook (1.66 GHz Intel Atom N280 Processor, 1 GB RAM, 160 GB Hard Drive, Bluetooth, XP Home, 6 Cell Battery) Black

Link here:

http://www.amazon.com/10-Inch-Netbook-Processor-Bluetooth-Battery/dp/B001QTXL82/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1233608330&sr=8-3

Might get (another) one - very happy with the various Eee PCs that litter the house. But get Eeebuntu. XP also runs fine on all of 'em, even the really low-end ones.
(http://www.eeebuntu.org/index.php?page=download)

Without revealing what operating system the PC 1000HE will include, Asus says the netbook will provide "fast bootup and shutdown times."

Looks like it comes with XP home

Well it's not the "weight" that makes it ineligible (though that might have something to do with it).

I've ordered some pretty heavy things from Amazon, using Prime. They are very clear about what is eligible and what isn't -- essentially, it has to be stored at one of Amazon's warehouses. Weight/bulkiness can be a factor here, especially if they already have a product of the same "kind" in the warehouse.

For example, these are Prime Eligible drum kits:

http://www.amazon.com/s/qid=1233619009/ref=sr_nr_n_2?ie=UTF8&rs=11970381&bbn=11970481&rnid=11970381&rh=n%3A11091801%2Cn%3A11970241%2Cn%3A11970381%2Cp_76%3A1%2Cn%3A11970481

(I don't know about that "ref=" stuff in the link. I won't make any money if you look)

I can't even think of one that I'd use for free, much less want to pay for. Like most college students, I use forums and Facebook and Google and Wikipedia and Amazon.

Amazon's premium service, although expensive ($70/year IIRC), is wonderfully addictive. It eliminates the $25 minimum for free shipping and upgrades you to "free" 2-day shipping. If nothing else, it's worth signing up for their free (1-month) trial if you ever run into something you need quickly and are too cheap to upgrade your shipping option.

Also, they allow you to invite (I think) up to 4 "household members" to share your membership. I do not know how they define "household member", but they haven't objected so far to me sharing a membership with my dad.

Just my $.02 - Donating to Wikipedia still seems more useful.

I'd love to get to come to Finland some day and see some of the memorials and museums related to the Winter and Continuation Wars. Where would you suggest I go?

This is a bit complicated. There's several on-site museums but you have to be willing to travel a bit. The most interesting site is Suomussalmi, where the a smallish Finnish force decimated two divisions and one tank brigade.. There's several monuments and museums on-site..
If you want to learn more about the important locations and events, I suggest reading "Frozen Hell" by William Trotter.

A very similar presentation of that idea is Sean William's The Resurrected Man. (http://www.amazon.com/Resurrected-Man-Sean-Williams/dp/1591023114) That's the link to the hardcover version.

and here (Apparently they found DOS 1.0 written on the tool).

and here

Okay, perhaps not.
/me ducks

More examples here

Back in the '60s (in stories like those in Niven's Known Space universe), it was always assumed that a fusion rocket would use a ramscoop technology to get fuel along the way. This entire concept seems to have fallen by the wayside. Are ramjets no longer considered a possible technology?

The quote is "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run," as told to Pulitzer-prize-winning investigative reporter James Wallace by a Microsoft developer while Wallace was doing interviews gathering material for the book Hard Drive: Bill Gates and the Making of the Microsoft Empire:

http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp/0887306292/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1233430962&sr=1-1

From one review of the book:

According to one Microsoft programmer, a few of the key people working on DOS 2.0 had a saying at the time that "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run." They managed to code a few hidden bugs into DOS 2.0 that caused Lotus 1-2-3 to breakdown when it was loaded. "There were as few as three or four people who knew this was being done," the employee said. He felt the highly competitive Gates was the ringleader.

The Kremlin had a term for people like you back during the Soviet era: "useful idiot."

I've heard great things about Lucene (guy at the company I used to work for swears by it, he used it for anything from searching B2B stores to biological indexing). Both Hibernate and Spring have support for this library.

I'm looking into adding search on my site so I should probably check it out. There's a new "In Action" book out for using the Hibernate Lucene add-on -- I might have to pick that up.

If you do a lot of calculations, you don't care how pretty something looks just how efficiently you can get those calculations done. The last thing I would ever want is for the device I use for that to have a touch screen because the second it made a mistake in selecting an option in some highly nested menu system I would throw it as hard as I could against the wall and break out the best engineering calculator made in the last 5 years. My 48gx is lost somewhere in the Cascades after a camping trip or I would still be using that.

You can find a pretty good rundown on the history of Walmart and China here. And, for a pretty fair breakdown of just how aggressive Walmart has gotten at pressuring its suppliers to use Chinese manufacturing, check out the book The Walmart Effect

And to think, right now Hollywood is wasting time making a movie based on The Road when pretty soon we'll all be living it! Better get that bathwater started...

~AA

There is a $37 phone from Motorola. If you only care about speaking, it could be a nice idea.

http://www.amazon.com/Motorola-Motofone-F3-Unlocked-Phone-International/dp/B0013A7KMW/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=wireless&qid=1233324126&sr=1-3

and here is a Nokia, for $39 which I actually seen/used one

http://www.amazon.com/Nokia-2610-Unlocked-Phone-U-S-Warranty/dp/B000K8IAS6/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=wireless&qid=1233324203&sr=1-5

There is a $37 phone from Motorola. If you only care about speaking, it could be a nice idea.

http://www.amazon.com/Motorola-Motofone-F3-Unlocked-Phone-International/dp/B0013A7KMW/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=wireless&qid=1233324126&sr=1-3

and here is a Nokia, for $39 which I actually seen/used one

http://www.amazon.com/Nokia-2610-Unlocked-Phone-U-S-Warranty/dp/B000K8IAS6/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&s=wireless&qid=1233324203&sr=1-5

But they hope for a lower price with mass production.

"At this stage, the price is working out to be $20 but with mass production it is bound to come down," R P Agarwal, secretary, higher education said.

Meanwhile, this laptop is still priced at $12.25.

Unfortunately those work only on Windows and Mac. Apparently people managed to jump through lots of loops to get them to work with Linux, but anyone knows if there are color calibrators that work with Linux off the box ? I haven't seen any driver for them in the kernel.

They implanted a module with six neural electrodes into the beetles when they were still in the pupae stage, and so the beetles mature, they have the electronics already embedded into their bodies. At that point, a battery pack and receiver are added, and by sending radio signals, the beetle can be made to take off, land, fly forwards and backwards, and steer left and right.

Source

Alot of /. articles are so-so, some are amazing, and every once in a great while there's one that ... well, kinda scares the shit out of me.

This is one of those articles. Does this article kind of creep you out? ... Are you a little creeped out because you believe beetles may have some form of free will and even if it's "just a beetle" they shouldn't be flown about like some kind of "machine"? What if we managed to create a machine with the intelligence of a Beetle? Not at all an unreasonable prospect... What if instead of reading about a biological breakthrough, you were instead reading about that little thing flying about... if violating the physical, biological beetle's freewill is appalling, should it not be appalling to do the same to the (theoretical) machine we just created? What happens when this gets to human level intelligences?

Rudy Rucker has a few interesting ideas of how this will all turn out, but in the end I believe most of those scenarios are a little too idealistic (but it's ok, because it's just (really good) sci-fi).

I really question if we're ready for this as a species.

Yeah, this story makes Slashdot sound like a rambunctious undergrad philosophy of science course. We might as well get a good textbook on the subject since this was all well-hashed out 50+ years ago.