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Mythical Man Month. A classic. There are no silver bullets! As true now as then.

Amen!

http://www.amazon.com/Who-Fourier-Mathematical-Transnational-College/dp/0964350408/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1230058191&sr=8-1 This is an amazing intro to calculus and fourier transforms. All with nice comic strip goodness

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Patterns-Object-Oriented-Addison-Wesley-Professional/dp/0201633612/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230057946&sr=8-1/

If you're doing oject oriented, there's no better place to start looking when you you're trying to learn good software design. I know, some people say patterns are overused, but they are essential to understanding and designing complex software.

I recently read Clean Code. The author has been coding for years and it shows. It has lots of little things that will help in your daily coding to produce a more professional product. If you follow the practices in this book you will actually be able to come back to old code a month or a year later and understand what you wrote.

Mythical Man Month. A classic. There are no silver bullets! As true now as then.

Calculus Made Easy - First book on calculus that ever explained things in a way that made sense to me.

Calculus Made Easy - First book on calculus that ever explained things in a way that made sense to me.

Teach Yourself C++ Programming in 21 Days

What? No? Alright then...

The C++ Programming Language, 3rd Edition is pretty excellent.

Applied Cryptography

Awesome book.

http://www.amazon.com/Switching-Power-Supply-Design-3rd/dp/0071482725/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1230057542&sr=8-2

I wrote a book a few years ago.

That was in Office v.X on an old PowerBook (I even started in the original "can't print" beta of Word v.X).

http://www.amazon.com/Compression-Great-Digital-Video-Techniques/dp/157820111X/

And I've got a couple due in 2009 for different publishers, so this has been much on my mind.

Based on a lot of the other comments, people are really focusing on the formatting aspects of the workflow: Latex, FrameMaker and all that. But if you're writing a book for a standard tech publisher, you likely will never even have a direct conversation with whomever does the layout. You turn in structured text and figured to an editor, when then passes it off to layout after editing.

And if it's any kind of a series, they'll be doing formatting according to a well defined template and style that'll map to the styles in the document you give them.

So, the actual workflow is that you get a Word template, and write everything in there. The key thing is to follow the Styles religiously - every paragraph should have one as you type it. Think writing in old school HTML, or XML to someone else's Schema.

Also, try not to even think about formatting; there's no saying what goes on what page based on Page Preview in Word or alternative. If you want a new section, use a section break. This is object-oriented writing, where you're really trying to get the content into the right structure for easy processing later on.

I recommend working in Outline and Normal/Draft mode only, since that's where you see the structure of what you're doing. Personally, I'm a born again believer in outlining. I outline a chapter, and then jump in and write the part of it I'm thinking about at the moment. With the outline there, it's easy to realize I need to introduce a concept earlier in the chapter and then jump there and do a quick sketch of it, since the earlier section already exists in the structure. The act of writing an outline also helps define all the stuff you didn't know you needed to figure out.

But don't be a slave to the outline as it exists; structure can need editing as much as prose. Don't be afraid of moving sections and chapters around as helps you communicate better. That's a lot easier to do early in the process.

"Stein on Writing" by Sol Stein
http://www.amazon.com/Stein-Writing-Successful-Techniques-Strategies/dp/0312254210/, is the only other weapon-of-choice against mundane writing.

Here's the demo for Scrivener
http://www.literatureandlatte.com/Scrivener_intro.mov... ...see just how different the Way of Working with words, it is...

Sheer Capability...

I actually agree with you, but the problem is very few people (probably less than 1%) are going to do that. Rush Limbaugh provided the theory and FOX news and Malcom Gladwell have proven beyond a doubt that people will pay attention to, and believe, what affirms their own biases and ignore dissenting opinions. There isn't a statistically significant population of people out there with the time, initiative, and/or intellectual capacity to subjectively analyze opposing views and form an honest opinion.

The desire for an unbiased news core came from an understanding that it was a lesser of two evils.

I'm about to finish my fourth book for O'Reilly, Beautiful Teams: Inspiring and Cautionary Tales from Veteran Team Leaders (which should be out in stores by March).

As far as tools go, my coauthor, Jenny, and I wrote our first book using Microsoft Word, but could just as easily have been using OpenOffice, Pages or any other word processor. One thing that was enormously useful was EndNote for managing the bibliography. Our next two books were in O'Reilly's Head First series (PMP and C#), and we wrote them entirely in Adobe InDesign. (People think that there's a whole team of people designing and laying out Head First books -- it was just us, our editor, and an awesome but overworked graphic designer, Lou, who helped improve our layouts once we had them in reasonable shape.) InDesign isn't exactly the easiest tool for a book author, but it was sufficient. But it made me really appreciate word processors!

A few things that really became clear to me over the course of working on these books:

a) Pay attention to what you're delivering to your editor, and what they'll do with it. Publishers have their own set of templates and production stuff to get camera-ready copy together. Head First was a very interesting lesson in that, because Jenny and I actually produced a lot of camera-ready copy ourselves. But for most books, whatever you turn over to your publisher will get transmogrified into their own internal format.

b) The production editor people I've worked with and talked to (not just at O'Reilly, but at other publishers, too) have been extremely competent, and it's their job to take whatever it is you give them and make it work. It needs to be copyedited, typeset, and reviewed, and sent to a printer. I highly recommend getting to know them, and being as flexible and agreeable as possible (they generally won't ask you to compromise your vision for the book -- it's generally about technical stuff, like how to deal with footnotes, references, images, etc.)

c) You asked about version control. One of the best authors I've ever worked with, Karl Fogel -- he's a contributor to Beautiful Teams, and also just a great guy -- wrote a fantastic book called Producing Open Source Software, which you can buy from O'Reilly or download for free from the website. (Anyone who's interested in starting or contributing to an open source project absolutely needs to read that book. Disclosure: I was a technical reviewer for it.) In true open source fashion, Karl made his version control repository for the book available, and that's a good model to copy. Jenny and I didn't do anything quite so formalized; we just shared folders, and that was sufficient for us (even with hundreds and hundreds of image files for each Head First book).

d) This is the most important thing: make sure you have a clear idea of what it is you want to write! It's easy to get started on a project, only to have it trail off because you don't really have a whole book's worth of material. The more you can outline, the more research you do, and the more you prepare, the better the book will be.

Now, that's all assuming that you have a publisher lined up and a contract signed. If you don't, I highly recommend reading through the excellent Writing for O'Reilly section on their website. They walk you through all of the steps of proposing a book and the mechanics of actually working with a publisher -- and from everyone I've talked to, it's very similar

First, my books:
Animating with Blender
and
The Essential Blender

The last one usually hangs around #1 seller on Amazon's 3d Graphics section, so you can judge my authority on that I guess.

I've worked with several technical publishers (Wiley/Sybex, Focal, No Starch, APress) as both an author and an editor, and at all of them, the manuscript pipeline has been MS Word. I've used OpenOffice, which has worked fine. Some publishers use the change tracking and notes features, some do edits with comments right in the text (weird but true).

As an author, you don't have to be concerned with generating a ToC or an actual Index. Keeping a running list of nice index terms is to your advantage, though. So really, if you're running a modern OS and have a word processor, and ftp client and an email package, you're set up. There really aren't any surprises.

Other than one other poster here who commented on how freaking much time it takes. They're correct. I was writing books over the last two holiday seasons, and my publisher wanted me to work on one this year, but I figured my family would officially kick me out if I tried for three in a row.

If this is your first time, get some feedback early on (first few chapters) from your editor. Ask them to be completely honest. I know some editors will tend to baby you a bit, but personally if I've written something that blows, I'd rather hear it bluntly.

Ask them to send you a properly formatted sample chapter from someone else's manuscript so you can be sure you're using their style guide correctly.

First, my books:
Animating with Blender
and
The Essential Blender

The last one usually hangs around #1 seller on Amazon's 3d Graphics section, so you can judge my authority on that I guess.

I've worked with several technical publishers (Wiley/Sybex, Focal, No Starch, APress) as both an author and an editor, and at all of them, the manuscript pipeline has been MS Word. I've used OpenOffice, which has worked fine. Some publishers use the change tracking and notes features, some do edits with comments right in the text (weird but true).

As an author, you don't have to be concerned with generating a ToC or an actual Index. Keeping a running list of nice index terms is to your advantage, though. So really, if you're running a modern OS and have a word processor, and ftp client and an email package, you're set up. There really aren't any surprises.

Other than one other poster here who commented on how freaking much time it takes. They're correct. I was writing books over the last two holiday seasons, and my publisher wanted me to work on one this year, but I figured my family would officially kick me out if I tried for three in a row.

If this is your first time, get some feedback early on (first few chapters) from your editor. Ask them to be completely honest. I know some editors will tend to baby you a bit, but personally if I've written something that blows, I'd rather hear it bluntly.

Ask them to send you a properly formatted sample chapter from someone else's manuscript so you can be sure you're using their style guide correctly.

Newspapers were considered so important to the country that the first amendment to the Constitution preserved the freedom of the press.

The Press is a pretty generic term. They might have been thinking of newspaper, or they might have been thinking of politically divisive books (for example, this one: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1596985275/bookstorenow600-20 which the Canadian government has been spazzing out over.)

In any case, even if newspapers do go away, "The Press" will still enjoy the same protections of the First Amendment.

You want to read about Watergate, read G. Gordon Liddy's biography, since he planned and executed Watergate. Then Read Stephen Ambrose's Nixon biography (the third one). Ambrose is the only one who gives a reason why Nixon would want to wiretap Larry O'Brien, not that I am convinced Nixon knew in advance (none of the principles involved have ever claimed this). Silent Coup is an incredibly detailed chronicle of Watergate, but I disagree with its conclusions, other than John Dean was a little rat (Dean was the president's lawyer while working as an FBI informant). Never trust a word that comes out of Dean's mouth.

You'd also want to read Bob Haldeman's and John Erlichman's biographies.

ATPM gets a lot wrong. The bottom line is Nixon wasn't brought down by Woodward and Bernstein, they just kept up the heat.

Nixon was brought down by a guy named Alexander Butterfield announcing to the Senate Watergate Committee that Nixon taped his conversations, which led to the smoking gun tape about Nixon telling the FBI that Watergate was a CIA operation, back-off. Nixon scuttled that idea the next day, but that tape is what brought him down, not W&B. Once Nixon finally released the tapes, that particular tape is what turned Barry Goldwater to support impeachment, and Nixon's goose was cooked. After Nixon heard he lost Goldwater, he turned to his SecState Al Haig and said, "Well, there goes the presidency, Al."

BTW, when Haig dies, I'm betting he was a Woodward source too. Haig, when NSA for Nixon, was given his military briefings by a young Naval Intelligence officer named Bob Woodward. To this day, Woodward will not talk about those briefings.

You want to read about Watergate, read G. Gordon Liddy's biography, since he planned and executed Watergate. Then Read Stephen Ambrose's Nixon biography (the third one). Ambrose is the only one who gives a reason why Nixon would want to wiretap Larry O'Brien, not that I am convinced Nixon knew in advance (none of the principles involved have ever claimed this). Silent Coup is an incredibly detailed chronicle of Watergate, but I disagree with its conclusions, other than John Dean was a little rat (Dean was the president's lawyer while working as an FBI informant). Never trust a word that comes out of Dean's mouth.

You'd also want to read Bob Haldeman's and John Erlichman's biographies.

ATPM gets a lot wrong. The bottom line is Nixon wasn't brought down by Woodward and Bernstein, they just kept up the heat.

Nixon was brought down by a guy named Alexander Butterfield announcing to the Senate Watergate Committee that Nixon taped his conversations, which led to the smoking gun tape about Nixon telling the FBI that Watergate was a CIA operation, back-off. Nixon scuttled that idea the next day, but that tape is what brought him down, not W&B. Once Nixon finally released the tapes, that particular tape is what turned Barry Goldwater to support impeachment, and Nixon's goose was cooked. After Nixon heard he lost Goldwater, he turned to his SecState Al Haig and said, "Well, there goes the presidency, Al."

BTW, when Haig dies, I'm betting he was a Woodward source too. Haig, when NSA for Nixon, was given his military briefings by a young Naval Intelligence officer named Bob Woodward. To this day, Woodward will not talk about those briefings.

You want to read about Watergate, read G. Gordon Liddy's biography, since he planned and executed Watergate. Then Read Stephen Ambrose's Nixon biography (the third one). Ambrose is the only one who gives a reason why Nixon would want to wiretap Larry O'Brien, not that I am convinced Nixon knew in advance (none of the principles involved have ever claimed this). Silent Coup is an incredibly detailed chronicle of Watergate, but I disagree with its conclusions, other than John Dean was a little rat (Dean was the president's lawyer while working as an FBI informant). Never trust a word that comes out of Dean's mouth.

You'd also want to read Bob Haldeman's and John Erlichman's biographies.

ATPM gets a lot wrong. The bottom line is Nixon wasn't brought down by Woodward and Bernstein, they just kept up the heat.

Nixon was brought down by a guy named Alexander Butterfield announcing to the Senate Watergate Committee that Nixon taped his conversations, which led to the smoking gun tape about Nixon telling the FBI that Watergate was a CIA operation, back-off. Nixon scuttled that idea the next day, but that tape is what brought him down, not W&B. Once Nixon finally released the tapes, that particular tape is what turned Barry Goldwater to support impeachment, and Nixon's goose was cooked. After Nixon heard he lost Goldwater, he turned to his SecState Al Haig and said, "Well, there goes the presidency, Al."

BTW, when Haig dies, I'm betting he was a Woodward source too. Haig, when NSA for Nixon, was given his military briefings by a young Naval Intelligence officer named Bob Woodward. To this day, Woodward will not talk about those briefings.

It is rare for these agreements to even approach 3 cents a minute nowadays, phone cards are proof of that because they usually average about 1-2 cents profit per minute because the competition is brutal. The phone companies are charging sometimes 50 times the amount they pay. So did you get that, MTS is charging 1.33 Canadian and you can get phone cards for around 4 cents a minute US. So around 40,000 minutes of calls which would cost around 1500 bucks US they are trying to get him to pay around 45,000 US or about 30 times cost. Are people really that stupid to still be sticking with a land line when they won't even spit on your asshole before raping you?

I have friends in Georgia, Russia and the Ukraine and I just use a cheap skype router and talk to them that way, it works better than the phone system. 90% of the people under the age of 35 in those countries do the same. So my question would be who were the calls to, who was making them and why can't they charge one of them?

Yes, we do. Try reading this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Blind-Mans-Bluff-Submarine-Espionage/dp/006097771X/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1229720621&sr=8-3

Also, what makes you think that the cables are always in water that deep? They have to come ashore some time, so they always enter shallower water at some point. Ships don't carry 20,000 foot long anchor chains either. Regardless of how they were cut, these cables were cut in relatively shallow water.

As someone who has dealt with depression and anxiety: 9-10 of meditation, exercise and healthy eating have helped far more than my doctors singular advice to take 3 different medications for over a year.

I've dealt with more than a few doctors who seem more interested in, to borrow a phrase, treating the illness and not the patient. I really do think that our drugs are over prescribed. In emergencies, no doubt would I want the latest and greatest; but for every day living your average person probably doesn't need a medicine cabinet full of prescriptions.

I'm as skeptical as the next guy when it comes to "alternative" medicine and down right dismissive of religious quackery from which of it stems. Conversely I can't help but feel there is a disconnect between modern medicine and patient care. There is more to being a doctor than telling people "Take two of these and call me in the morning.". A school of thought I immediately align authors of books like this to.

I haven't started it yet, but I am looking forward to cracking open this book as well as digging deeper into Zen & the Brain. Both also written by MD's.

As someone who has dealt with depression and anxiety: 9-10 of meditation, exercise and healthy eating have helped far more than my doctors singular advice to take 3 different medications for over a year.

I've dealt with more than a few doctors who seem more interested in, to borrow a phrase, treating the illness and not the patient. I really do think that our drugs are over prescribed. In emergencies, no doubt would I want the latest and greatest; but for every day living your average person probably doesn't need a medicine cabinet full of prescriptions.

I'm as skeptical as the next guy when it comes to "alternative" medicine and down right dismissive of religious quackery from which of it stems. Conversely I can't help but feel there is a disconnect between modern medicine and patient care. There is more to being a doctor than telling people "Take two of these and call me in the morning.". A school of thought I immediately align authors of books like this to.

I haven't started it yet, but I am looking forward to cracking open this book as well as digging deeper into Zen & the Brain. Both also written by MD's.

Congratulations, your half-way to becoming the newest member of the Borg collective! Just need a machine suit and a bunch of implants, and the transition to your new life is complete.

Kevin Warwick has him beat. I'm surprised he didn't immediately pop up in a first post. He's a well-known figure in nerd subculture. If you haven't heard about his odd lifestyle choices yet, his autobiography I, Cyborg does much to explain his thinking.

Plug in a Kill-A-Watt. $24.99 on Amazon. It'll tell you your line voltage (with or without load), power consumption, and energy usage for the duration it's plugged in. If nothing else, you can figure out where your electricity is going, how much energy your computer(s) is/are using, and how well your UPS is living up to its promises (unplug it and watch its performance).

I don't work for them or anything, it's just a good way to see what your UPS is up to and learn a little about your household energy usage.

Of course, if your problem really is your PSU rather than your UPS, all this unit does is narrow down the problem rather than solve it... Still, I consider it worth my $25.

Been reading Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash , have you?

I remember reading in Freiberger's Fire in the Valley , his chronicle of the birth of the PC in the 1970s, that Woz and Jobs formed an almost ideal partnership, with Woz creating sublime technical solutions and Jobs knowing how to work people to make them sell. With Jobs, Apple might not have gone anywhere, but rather would have disappeared like so many hobbyist PC projects of the era.

So did I.

Until the day I came across Slashdot.

The geek's will to believe can make one long for the more mature and analytical minds of AM Talk Radio.

what rational person expects to have good results when operating an extremely complex machine that they don't understand?

We all place our trust in systems and machines we do not understand. We all make decisions based on instinct and convenience.

I can't say with any certainty that I'd derive any direct benefit from the sort of ubiquity that Windows and IE currently enjoy

The $200 HD Camcorder is this year's high-tech stocking stuffer.

You can drop this in your WalMart cart and leave the store thinking that all the fun stuff is being made for Windows.

It's not cheap, but there's a book on programming the cell processor here.

It doesn't discuss MPI, but it describes IBM's Accelerated Library Framework (ALF), which is a similar methodology of development and deployment.

Ironically you would be travelling the most distance in your life and end not going anywhere.

Wasn't it Robert Heinlein who said that once you're in orbit, you're halfway to anywhere? In any event, getting into orbit makes it faster to reach any other point on Earth than with traditional jet aircraft. In his 1996 novel Firestar , the first volume of a future history on the development of private space travel, Michael Flynn foresaw FedEx being one of the first patrons of spaceports, so that it could deliver urgent parcels faster. That was always an unreasonable expectation, and with the economic downturn it's even less likely, but perhaps other needs for getting into orbit to get elsewhere will arise.

Jamendo
Magnatune
Amazon
Napster
iTunes Store ... blech.

Anyone know of any popular "instructional series" comic books/graphic novels?

Larry Gonick's work.

And, while this is the wrong crowd, there are lots of non-free older games that are trivially cheap. A few copies of Age of Empires II, for example, could provide a lot of entertainment at a low price, and it's even quasi-educational.

If you think this is bad, wait until you see the kind of inappropriate relationships that transact in The Manga Guide to Databases. I hear that there are even some graphic replication scenes that slipped past the censors.

There is a Mac version: http://www.amazon.com/Rise-Nations-Gold-Mac/dp/B0002ITT84

Last I heard, OpenOffice.org was a free download for Windows.

MS Office Home and Student is $70 at Amazon.com.

Three seat license. $50 if purchased with a qualifying laptop. If you have student ID and a collegiate e-mail address, Office Ultimate is $70 - direct from Microsoft. If you employer has a volume licensing plan, MS Office can be yours for the S&H costs of the media.

Walmart has yet to bundle a printer with a Linux PC - or link to a printer that has a Linux driver. If ink and paper are within your budget, then MS Office is within your budget.

Go read the book 'High Crimes'. It's a really amazing book about the greed, desperation and , simply put, evil that surrounds everest. Picture oxygen tanks stolen when a group makes its last ascent, knife fights, torn tents, etc..

And anyway, why shouldn't religious groups contribute to political parties, just like any other group?

Because people who believe in completely asinine shit dreamed up by scientifically ignorant folks three thousand years ago simply because a) it's what their parents believed, b) some narrow sliver of the dogma fills a spiritual need in them, and/or c) it is politically convenient to do so, are arguably dangerously irrational and should be barred from influencing government?

Seriously, this ancient religion shit is a cancer. There's nothing wrong with spirituality, but when you start getting your moral lessons from a collection of iron-age fairy tales, you're not behaving in a civilized manner. I know, something like 80% of people are "believers" in one ridiculous ancient religion or another, and that (for example) you can't get elected President in the US unless you profess a belief in the Almighty God of the Christians, but that doesn't make it right. In this country we even have some states that have allowed religious definitions of sin and marriage to be codified into law via constitutional amendment. Some day in the future, people are going to look at the stuff our [politicians|judges|*] say about believing in God's word as guiding principle the same way we look at the Inquisition's belief in witchcraft.

Anyone of a rational bent interested in a good examination of the dangers of religion, even as practiced by "moderates", pick up a copy of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris. It's very good.

Here's the US one. At $378 it's only $9 more than the Windows XP version. There doesn't seem to be a Vista version. Hey, that's a heck of a deal!

The days of Microsoft coming in and telling a big OEM what to do are long gone.

If only that were so... They are getting pushback now and then, and that's a new thing for them, but they're still the 800lb gorilla they've always been.

"Hard drives, while they may fail, are still probably your best chance."

I tend to agree, however I'm a bit confused over what exactly is being requested.

"I've thought about buying a bunch of 4GB thumb drives....I have less than 500GBs and only save things important to me."

At first glance I thought you had 500gb you were trying to store, but then you mentioned "buying a bunch of 4GB thumbdrives" and I can't imagine someone buying 125 4gb thumbdrives to use for backup. So exactly how much data are you trying to store?

If less than 50gb, I'd suggest a few SD cards. 8gb SD is ~$11, or 16gb for $30. While more expensive than hard drives per gb, SD cards are remarkably resilient, surviving a week in the ocean, and a few in a ziplock bag stored in a safe deposit box would probably last close to forever.

SD will probably still be around at least for the next decade or longer. SD has already been around since 1999 and all modern card readers read SD cards by default. SD slots are in nearly every form of consumer electronic device, and every manufacture of digital cameras uses SD except Sony and Olympus, almost guaranteeing the card readers will be around for many years to come.

I would suggest against USB anything since they're already discussing cutting the cord on USB and going wireless USB. While I don't predict that will happen overnight you wanted a solution that would be available decades from now, and wired USB might go the way of the parallel port, which was the standard external port in the 80s and 90s but was replaced by USB late 90s. Parallel port only had a lifespan of about 20 yrs and is no longer on modern PCs, and USB has been out just over 10 years so it's feasible in 10 years PCs will no longer have USB ports, everything will be wireless USB.

"Hard drives, while they may fail, are still probably your best chance."

I tend to agree, however I'm a bit confused over what exactly is being requested.

"I've thought about buying a bunch of 4GB thumb drives....I have less than 500GBs and only save things important to me."

At first glance I thought you had 500gb you were trying to store, but then you mentioned "buying a bunch of 4GB thumbdrives" and I can't imagine someone buying 125 4gb thumbdrives to use for backup. So exactly how much data are you trying to store?

If less than 50gb, I'd suggest a few SD cards. 8gb SD is ~$11, or 16gb for $30. While more expensive than hard drives per gb, SD cards are remarkably resilient, surviving a week in the ocean, and a few in a ziplock bag stored in a safe deposit box would probably last close to forever.

SD will probably still be around at least for the next decade or longer. SD has already been around since 1999 and all modern card readers read SD cards by default. SD slots are in nearly every form of consumer electronic device, and every manufacture of digital cameras uses SD except Sony and Olympus, almost guaranteeing the card readers will be around for many years to come.

I would suggest against USB anything since they're already discussing cutting the cord on USB and going wireless USB. While I don't predict that will happen overnight you wanted a solution that would be available decades from now, and wired USB might go the way of the parallel port, which was the standard external port in the 80s and 90s but was replaced by USB late 90s. Parallel port only had a lifespan of about 20 yrs and is no longer on modern PCs, and USB has been out just over 10 years so it's feasible in 10 years PCs will no longer have USB ports, everything will be wireless USB.

Nowadays I can buy a 1000 gigabyte disk drive for around $250

Its much better prices than that. For example, for a 1000 gigabyte disk, e.g. Seagate ST31000340AS 1TB Barracuda Sata 7200 Rpm 32MB Cache 8.5MS Hard Drive

Amazon $109.99
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B000UC3CN0/ref=nosim/

Dell $128.99
http://accessories.us.dell.com/sna/productdetail.aspx?sku=A1307909&cs=19&c=us&l=en&dgc=SS&cid=30322&lid=680413

On the subject of management in general, may I also recommend: First, Break All the Rules. The advice in the book is backed by 25 years of actual research into correlation between management and business outcomes of productivity, profitability, retention, and customer satisfaction. And it just makes a lot of sense.

I'll also recommend Peopleware and follow the advice in the "Oh for crying out loud" post that this reply is under. I was going to post essentially the same advice.

I once managed a software development group that had several Ph.Ds, some people with Masters degrees (I have an M.Sc. in Math) and most of the rest with B.Sc.s in computer science. We were developing software for a radar project and most of the Ph.Ds had degrees that were applicable in fields like high energy physics and atmospheric physics, etc. They all came to the same conclusion that they couldn't do what I did which was serve as the communications channel between my group and upper management. All I had to do was make sure thet they knew that I knew that they had the answers. They even had to help me with the questions some times.

The key was that I didn't have a problem with this situation. It would have been a problem if I had pretended to know or had ignored the fact that they knew more about the subject than me. Instead, we became a team that solved the problem (almost on time and very close to within budget on a cost plus contract).

The people working for you (hopefully) want to solve the problems you bring to them. Work with them to understand the problem and keep the part that they are trying to solve within the realm of technology. Do your best to keep company politics from disrupting them. Likewise, learn to spot when someone is trying to have your team create a technical fix to what is essentially a political problem. That's usually a recipe for disaster. The better you are able to keep your team focused on technical issues, the happier, more successful and more productive they will be.

One last thing to remember. You mentioned that your team is older than you. Keep in mind that most if not all of them made a conscious decision NOT to go into management at some point in their career. They don't want to deal with management/company politics stuff. That's your job and they will be happy to let you do it so long as they can keep coding.

Cheers,
Dave

http://www.amazon.com/Feiner-Points-Leadership-People-Perform/dp/0446695750/

http://www.amazon.com/Corps-Business-Management-Principles-Marines/dp/0066619793/

They've earned enough freedom to work in, you've got only to work WITH 'em, to make the results engage the rest of the enterprise the way it needs to, and to arrange the leverage they need.

http://www.amazon.com/Rapid-Development-Taming-Software-Schedules/dp/1556159005/ for excellent learning in the difference between effective management & ineffective.

Also, take a look at http://www.taskjuggler.org/ , and do some learning in some GOOD project management books.

Good luck, Good work, and Good living to ye.

Cheerses,

    -Antryg

http://www.amazon.com/Feiner-Points-Leadership-People-Perform/dp/0446695750/

http://www.amazon.com/Corps-Business-Management-Principles-Marines/dp/0066619793/

They've earned enough freedom to work in, you've got only to work WITH 'em, to make the results engage the rest of the enterprise the way it needs to, and to arrange the leverage they need.

http://www.amazon.com/Rapid-Development-Taming-Software-Schedules/dp/1556159005/ for excellent learning in the difference between effective management & ineffective.

Also, take a look at http://www.taskjuggler.org/ , and do some learning in some GOOD project management books.

Good luck, Good work, and Good living to ye.

Cheerses,

    -Antryg

http://www.amazon.com/Feiner-Points-Leadership-People-Perform/dp/0446695750/

http://www.amazon.com/Corps-Business-Management-Principles-Marines/dp/0066619793/

They've earned enough freedom to work in, you've got only to work WITH 'em, to make the results engage the rest of the enterprise the way it needs to, and to arrange the leverage they need.

http://www.amazon.com/Rapid-Development-Taming-Software-Schedules/dp/1556159005/ for excellent learning in the difference between effective management & ineffective.

Also, take a look at http://www.taskjuggler.org/ , and do some learning in some GOOD project management books.

Good luck, Good work, and Good living to ye.

Cheerses,

    -Antryg

Another good book is Managing Einsteins

Just choosing XP, RAD, UDP, Scrum, etc... without sizing up how experienced, aside from just knowing Java, those developers are is just asking for trouble. If they are truly seasoned, they'd respect the need for software methodologies & such. Java sort of forces you to think in a more structured sense that you'll find managing the team will be easier than [cough] development in another language. Come on folks, Java puts you into a pretty structured mindset, and that does have its pros and cons. Start there and you'll be in good shape (for scheduling, budgeting, RA, deployment, etc..).

Rule of thumb, is if you're working on a software product, time is the determining factor and most of the Agile methods the developers [will] get if you manage in that fashion (causal meetings, thinking about features, letting them limit what features). If you building a solution, it going to be a mix of multiple methodologies, where your challenge will be getting the developers pay attention to the schedule (it's critical), so they can truly make informed technical/design decisions (you pay more of a mitigator, guiding role, and it's less causal).

If you haven't already, checking out "The Mythical Man Month" doesn't hurt too.