Slashdot Mirror

Check out the TV show Connections... http://www.amazon.com/Connections-2-5-DVD-set/dp/B0000DIZSF

OEM thing is always shadowy but if we speak about retail sales, Amazon as a number 1 globally known brand can give a clue.

Apple OS X Leopard made into top 10 software sales list months before going into market, as a pre-order without a significant rebate. Vista never, ever made into that list, at least top 10 section.

Now checking (warning: It is dynamic), MS Windows XP SP2 _is_ on the list, home edition (there goes corporate keeps stable excuse), number 20
http://www.amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/software/ref=sv_sw_0

MS Office Windows/Mac editions make top 2 of list too. So, there is no issue with ordering MS stuff from Amazon, people choose Amazon to buy MS software they need.

"45 percent of all of new business PCs"

In October, Microsoft reported 88 million copies of Vista sold. In April they reported 140 million. That's 52 million in 6 months, whereas approximately 140 million PCs were sold in the same period.

52/140 = 37.1%

I wonder where Ballmer gets his numbers, because they don't match Microsoft's 10-Q.

Oh and have a look at http://amazon.com/gp/bestsellers/pc/ ... Vista is selling on quite a bit less than "100 per cent of all the new consumer PCs".

Today I am homeless. My money does not provide me shelter. My good health does not ensure my survival. My friends are unable to help me. I am being killed, but the law offers me no protection.
...
Having stumbled upon an obviously well-kept secret, I researched the world literature on bioelectromagnetics, (or the biological effects of electromagnetism), and made myself an expert. I learned that electro-cautery machines, used in every modern surgical operation to cut through tissue and to stop bleeding, expose surgeons to much higher levels of radio frequency radiation than is permitted for workers in any industry. I learned that there was a disease thoroughly described in the Russian and Eastern European medical literature called radiowave sickness, the existence of which was usually denied by western authorities. This description made me remember my `unknown illness', the one that had derailed my medical career. Bradycardia, or a slow heart rate, was said, in these texts, to be a grave sign.

Because there are virtually no workplaces without computers any more, I have not held a job since 1990. I had resigned myself to living on Social Security Disability, and learned, together with other members of a support group I had found, how best to live with my disability. This mostly meant learning to avoid exposure to electromagnetic fields. But in July 1996, to my dismay, I learned that an innovation was coming to my city, which threatened to make it impossible to avoid exposure any more.
...
The California Department of Health Services has concluded that, on the basis of a telephone survey, 120,000 Californians - and by implication one million Americans - have left their jobs because of electromagnetic pollution in the workplace. The people who have left their homes for such a reason are not being counted by anyone.

http://www.amazon.com/Ill-Wind-Kevin-J-Anderson/dp/0312857608
Did you mean this, where a bacteria created to eat oil spills ate the world's petrochemical supply? The book with the mountain-mounted railgun?

A single link to a single slanted book gets 5/informative?!?!? Oh yeah ... we're on slashdot ... I keep forgetting that But one must admit your broad base of study is staggering (questionable if you've even read past the title of the book). But at least one item in your argument is semi-valid ... you admit 'conjecture'. But that's the most intelligent part of your post/argument. A few more links in case you or others are willing to read more than one slanted title or account (likely, others than the pp could figure this out though) http://www.amazon.com/Joseph-Smith-Rough-Stone-Rolling/dp/1400077532/ http://www.amazon.com/Book-Mormon-Another-Testament-Christ/dp/038551316X ("...by their fruits, ye shall know them" ... but you have to RTB first) ... or just query 'Joseph Smith' and look at more than one book (yep .. that's possible with today's technology) http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=joseph+smith&x=0&y=0

A single link to a single slanted book gets 5/informative?!?!? Oh yeah ... we're on slashdot ... I keep forgetting that But one must admit your broad base of study is staggering (questionable if you've even read past the title of the book). But at least one item in your argument is semi-valid ... you admit 'conjecture'. But that's the most intelligent part of your post/argument. A few more links in case you or others are willing to read more than one slanted title or account (likely, others than the pp could figure this out though) http://www.amazon.com/Joseph-Smith-Rough-Stone-Rolling/dp/1400077532/ http://www.amazon.com/Book-Mormon-Another-Testament-Christ/dp/038551316X ("...by their fruits, ye shall know them" ... but you have to RTB first) ... or just query 'Joseph Smith' and look at more than one book (yep .. that's possible with today's technology) http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=joseph+smith&x=0&y=0

A single link to a single slanted book gets 5/informative?!?!? Oh yeah ... we're on slashdot ... I keep forgetting that But one must admit your broad base of study is staggering (questionable if you've even read past the title of the book). But at least one item in your argument is semi-valid ... you admit 'conjecture'. But that's the most intelligent part of your post/argument. A few more links in case you or others are willing to read more than one slanted title or account (likely, others than the pp could figure this out though) http://www.amazon.com/Joseph-Smith-Rough-Stone-Rolling/dp/1400077532/ http://www.amazon.com/Book-Mormon-Another-Testament-Christ/dp/038551316X ("...by their fruits, ye shall know them" ... but you have to RTB first) ... or just query 'Joseph Smith' and look at more than one book (yep .. that's possible with today's technology) http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=joseph+smith&x=0&y=0

There is a book on Amazon about the subject. Don't ask me what MX stands for. Probably some Japanese abbreviation for "nanometric matrix of palladium and zyrcon oxide".

Why not? Launching with a non-nuclear starter chemical-high-explosive bomb, from a steel-plated launch site, with a specific low-radiation 'fuel capsule' (not just a bomb, but a special efficient bomb designed for no fallout) would result in no fallout. Read the book and learn: http://www.amazon.com/Project-Orion-Story-Atomic-Spaceship/dp/0805072845/ref=sr_1_32?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211597734&sr=8-32

Even now, I see the despare that is in the 20-35 y.o. WRT human space flights. Yet, if we really want to explore AND to preserve mankind, then we MUST go along. The reason is that at this time, we are the best tool. High maintence, but still the only flexable tool.

You mean compared to NASA ignoring & hiding their own data ??

I was going to suggest a pair of WRT54GLs running Tomato with some 15dBi antennas, but ethernet like that is going to be a much more reliable solution, if a bit harder to install.

I was going to suggest a pair of WRT54GLs running Tomato with some 15dBi antennas, but ethernet like that is going to be a much more reliable solution, if a bit harder to install.

Completely unrelated- I've always been a fan of your posts, being an aficionado of history myself. I did note your reference to feudalism there, and wondered if you'd had a chance to see Susan Reynolds' Fiefs & Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted in which she tackles and dismantles the very concept of feudalism as an applicable model.

Of course, when posting on a forum such as /., it's justifiable to use the word as shorthand.

So you're saying that no one out there is still buying copies of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly? I can walk into Wal-Mart and pick that one up, not to mention, go to Amazon and buy pretty much any movie I want. Even films like All Quiet on the Western Front, a movie made 80 years ago, where all of the people involved in the production are now dead. How is that not indefinitely, for all intents and purposes?

So you're saying that no one out there is still buying copies of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly? I can walk into Wal-Mart and pick that one up, not to mention, go to Amazon and buy pretty much any movie I want. Even films like All Quiet on the Western Front, a movie made 80 years ago, where all of the people involved in the production are now dead. How is that not indefinitely, for all intents and purposes?

Ya, but you don't have to buy a Dell and that is the point. With a Dell you get a pre-assembled computer. But with my current comp (and the one before that) I built it from parts and saved bank.

But how many people can build their own computer? Most people wouldn't even try to build their own. And you can't just get the parts from anywhere. When my HP died I went shopping looking for part to rebuild it, and all the parts together cost more than simply buying a new computer no matter where I looked. The parts may be cheaper online like at Newegg, however when I have any trouble I want a local brick and mortar store I can go to.

But for the individual building it yourself can save a lot of dough.

Only if you're a geek.

It's the inability to do that with a Mac that annoys me.

You can build your own Mac, I first heard of people doing it in the '80s. There was even a book published in the late 1980s or early '90s. Here it is, "Build Your Own Macintosh and Save a Bundle", the second edition was published in 1992. And with an addin card, you could get the Amiga to run the Mac OS and software.

He had a lot to say.
http://www.amazon.com/Country-Right-Left-1940-1943-Journalism/dp/1567921345

My favorite though it is most hated by some political persuasions is this.

Even as it stands, the Home Guard could only exist in a country where men feel themselves free. The totalitarian states can do great things, but there is one thing they cannot do: they cannot give the factory-worker a rifle and tell him to take it home and keep it in his bedroom. That rifle hanging on the wall of the working-class flat or labourer's cottage, is the symbol of democracy. It is our job to see that it stays there.

The Art of Rails covers intermediate Rails topics quite nicely, and just came out so it had the chance to cover some of the Rails 2.0 developments (particularly related to nested routes and REST services). I've been reading through a copy and have found it really helpful so far -- especially the three chapters on advanced Ruby development patterns.

Patri Friedman, grandson of [Nobel Laureate] Milton and son of anarcho-theorist David, is even today actively planning to launch artificial sea platform communities, which he's calling seasteads, currently hoping to start one in San Francisco Bay. That's the spirit of America, as John Adams never quite said: may I advocate classical-liberal limited government, so that my son may advocate anarcho-capitalism, and that my grandson may plan to build new artificial countries in the ocean.

He must have read this one:

http://www.amazon.com/Millennial-Project-Colonizing-Galaxy-Eight/dp/0316771635

Stuart Slade wrote The Big One and other books in that timeline as a series of chapters on a message board. People would then comment on it and so forth. He once explained why the print version had so many typos in it, but I forget what the reason was.

There are still stories being written for it, too.

Try some Ankle Weights. Adding just 10 lbs extra to your weight you have to carry around burns calories and adds muscle tone. If you do not have a place you can walk to from your home, a coffee place, bar or the like...find one even if you have to drive to it. Walking around a museum or city park is still walking and you might find a new friend or more. An art museum in my town costs about 50 bucks a year for a year long membership, the natural history museum is almost 150 bucks and the parks are always free.

I hadn't even noticed that Hamas had so many videos on youtube.
Those interested should check out http://youtube.com/watch?v=U8Nj-QKQkCo and related videos.

Also an interesting movie I watched recently was "suicide killers". It contains many interviews with suicide bombers right before they kill themselves, and many interviews with failed suicide bombers in Israeli prisons.

http://www.amazon.com/Suicide-Killers-Pierre-Rehov/dp/B000NVHWIE
http://www.mininova.org/tor/635799

Maybe I am just strange, but I find it absolutely fascinating how a group of people can have such a strong hatred of Israel. It's a really fucked up situation for both sides, but I think it is very important for both sides to be heard.

Carl Sagan got dibs way before both y'all.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/reader/0345331354/ref=sib_dp_pt#
(search "neutrino", click Page 260)

And Ann Druyan will you sue for billions and billions of dollars.

In Michael Crichton's Jurassic Park , the dinosaur DNA extracted from the stomachs of mosquitos trapped in amber is incomplete as well, but by combining it with the DNA of modern reptiles, a decent simalcrum of a dinosaur could be had. Does this Tasmanian tiger development vindicate (at least the less out there elements of) Crichton's plot?

The target receives messages on his lab equipment, but the funny thing is that messages that can potentially change the course of time are gibberish (because then the originator wouldn't have sent them) and the harmless ones go through just fine. It's an interesting idea. How can you transmit important information this way ?

I won't spoil the book for you...

Just noticed that David R. Palmer mentions three new books in an Amazon review of Emergence. In addition to Tracking, apparently pending are a sequel to Threshold and a third novel unrelated to his prior books.

It's probably too much to hope that Donald Kingsbury has also been busy writing.

>So my point is: if RISC needs more instructions to do the same work, does it require a higher clock frequency to
>achieve similar performance to a CISC chip ? Since clock speeds do not scale to infinity, this implies that a
>RISC chip will hit the frequency wall sooner, thus limiting its maximum speed.

Learn about things like pipelining and forwarding, out-of-order execution, etc.
A non-trivial amount of work is involved in decoding machine instructions, this
is far simpler on a RISC machine. Register architecture has tended to be simpler,
which gives compilers a simpler job. RISC machines have fewer addressing modes,
which also simplifies things, especially in a pipeline.

Benefits to CISC have been mainly for (us) assembly programmers.

RISC architectures are able to do things with the instructions that are too complicated to
do in a CISC architecture.

You probably don't realize how "RISC-ish" x86 has been since 4. Legacy instructions worked,
they just caused pipeline stalls. Now they get split up into separate instructions that can be pipelined.
Do not underestimate the magnitude of the gains that have been made by pipelining and forwarding, and this is MUCH easier to implement in a smaller, very consistent instruction set. So easy, in fact, implementing it, even going as far as to code a simulator for the MIPS architecture or writing compilers to the MIPS target, is pretty standard second-year undergrad material.

A very good book on the subject, very accessible:

http://www.amazon.com/Computer-Organization-Design-Hardware-Interface/dp/0123706068/ref=sr_1_6?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1211247399&sr=1-6

NCR Dayton Was where the US 4-rotor BOMBEs were manufactured, and Sugar Camp was where the WAVES workers were housed. There's a great book on it "The Secret in Building 26". http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Building-26-Americas-Against/dp/0375508074

The actual US codebreaking was done at Nebraska Avenue in DC, which is about to be re-purposed or sold as well. True, you can't save everything, but Bletchley is a small facility with a great history and the mansion alone is worth saving for its quirky architecture.

If you eat less energy than you expend you will obviously lose weight

My point here obviously isn't to justify it but to point out that an "all seeing eye" at the very least serves the purpose of stamping out opposition to the government. Just good record keeping and census as in the case of 18th century China was enough to track down a dissenting voice.

If you can't pronounce or understand any ingredient name, don't buy the item.

Or, you could spend a little bit of time to learn what the ingredient is, and then make your decision based off of information instead of FUD. Along those lines, I'd like to recommend What Einstein Told His Cook. It's quite interesting, and probably fairly accessible to most /. readers.

"There is still the demand because people like you desire it."

• no passwords were requested;
  
• no comments were posted;
  
• no payment was made; therefore,
  

"I think most of the supply is created by people who desire to supply such material. Period."

"Why choose that market? It's because they're into it, and from what I hear, they usually participate."

"Actually, now that I've thought about it, I think you're equivocating somewhere, perhaps with the business definition of 'demand', as you claim that if the industry were to collapse, then there wouldn't be any industry. But you claimed it would just be free."

its that virgin killer album isn't it? no i haven't even looked i'm just guessing, i know a couple of music sites that got raided over it.

STUPIDEST FUCKING THING EVER.

Its on amazon.com for fucks sakes http://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-media/product-gallery/B0000073NK/ref=cm_ciu_pdp_images_1?ie=UTF8&index=1

He noted that the various dependencies of the lock are lost in the haze of 15 years of code changes, "all this has built up to a kind of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt about the BKL: nobody really knows it, nobody really dares to touch it and code can break silently and subtly if BKL locking is wrong."

Wow. It sounds like it's about time someone on the kernel team reads Working Effectively With Legacy Code by Michael Feathers.

I'm a software developer myself on a very large project myself, and this book has absolutely revolutionized what I do. Having things break silently in the kernel is a sure sign that dependency problems in the code exist, and most of this book is about ways to break dependencies effectively and get code under test. And that's the other thing... if they aren't writing tests for everything they do, then even the code they write today is legacy code. Code without tests can't be easilly checked for correctness when a change is made, can fail silently easilly, and can't be understood as easilly.

That's what this book is about, and if things in the kernel have deteriorated to such a state then they need to swallow their pride and take a look at resources designed to cope with this. I know they are all uber-coders in many respects, but everyone has something they can improve on, and from the description they give of their own code, this is their area for improving.

But either way: no available surface water. No canals. no oceans.

All in all, bad news for people who hoped that Kim Stanley Robinson's trilogy beginning with Red Mars would be a reasonable vision of the settlement and terraformation of Mars. If there are not subterranean aquifers close enough to the surface to be accessible, then things are going to be very hard-going.

I'm not sure if you're serious or not, but I get tired of the whole 'man is the ultimate evil' thing, especially since a lot of the people who believe that back it up with baseless information. Plenty of animals, like bears, kill each other (even their young) under the right circumstances. Animals war with one another (amongst their own species) just like us. In fact, Planet Earth has a segment that shows two tribes of gorillas fighting over territory. Likewise, plenty of different species will fight over things such as food or mates.

Of course, a lot of these conflicts end with one party surrendering rather than death, but the same is true of humans. On Killing does a pretty good job of showing how humans have a natural aversion to killing members of their own species (even in times of war) just like any other animal. And plenty of animals other than humans have been known to use tools. I'm too lazy to find the article, but I remember reading, about a year ago, an account of an ape using a bone to test the depth of the water in a river. It's safe to say that they animal kingdom has the same capacity for 'evil' as man. We just happen to be the dominant species and are very self-centered so no one pays attention to what the other creatures of the Earth are up to.

http://uniset.ca/terr/news/lat_fbibreakin.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weatherman_(organization)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Microsoft
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedition_Act_of_1918
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_and_Sedition_Acts
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SLAPP
http://www.amazon.com/Bowling-Alone-Collapse-American-Community/dp/0743203046/sr=8-1/qid=1172469926/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/105-3962904-3664448?ie=UTF8&s=books
http://code.google.com/p/torchat/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_the_Shah's_Men
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_and_Contras_cocaine_trafficking_in_the_US
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_drug_trafficking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_MKULTRA
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reichstag_Fire_Decree
http://web.mit.edu/gtmarx/www/iron.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jury_nullification
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Rule_Book
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repeal_of_prohibition
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Writeprint
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Van_Eck_phreaking
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sousveillance
http://www.cgsecurity.org/wiki/PhotoRec
http://www.eff.org/testyourisp/pcapdiff/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
http://ai.bpa.arizona.edu/COPLINK/
http://ai.bpa.arizona.edu/research/coplink/authorship.htm
http://www.coplink.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COINTELPRO
http://www.zurich.ibm.com/security/idemix/
http://packetstormsecurity.nl/filedesc/Practical_Onion_Hacking.pdf.html
http://www.williamson-labs.com/laser-mic.htm
http://www-users.cs.umn.edu/~dfrankow/files/privacy-sigir2006.pdf
http://freehaven.net/anonbib/topic.html#Anonymous_20communication
http://www.wiley.com/legacy/compbooks/mcnamara/links.html

Because the black crime/poverty/violence problem crosses cultures, and even pervades black countries, the onus is on you to prove that the problem is external.

No, wrong, there is no "default" point of view that is someone's onus to dispel, except the null hypothesis that it's all due to chance. Someone has posed the hypothesis that the difference in incarceration rates is due to society and culture, someone else said it's racial. The onus is on anyone putting forth one of these hypothesis. If they fail to do so, that doesn't make someone else's hypothesis true.

And I think you'll find that if you start looking at the socio-economics across countries, especially if you start looking at crime in non-black communities and countries, you'll find that economics first, and politics second, are the dominating factors, not race.

Furthermore, for your point to be useful, you must show that the "society and culture" problem is solvable.

I don't know that it is, but you completely missed what society they were talking about. We're talking about the society of the United States, of which blacks are just one part, and you therefore can't consider black culture in the U.S. in isolation. And if you think the society as it arose was an automatic effect of them being here, I think you've got your history backwards. Besides, go back in time, and we could just as easily be talking about violence in Italian American or Irish American communities. Think that's an inherent problem of those people too?

And if all cultures are indeed equivalent, yet some cultures fail miserably, it must be because another culture is holding them down, right?

Right, so you are questioning the idea that a culture failing implies that it was held down by another. This is a logical.

But do you also question the idea that a culture holding down another culture implies that the oppressed culture is more likely to fail? Because that would be completely illogical.

And in many cases of what you're calling "automatic", history is completely clear that such oppression has occurred. Not all, but a great, great many. Your rhetorical question only makes sense in the absence of any evidence one way or the other.

And if you want to look even farther back in time to find a way to blame any failure on inherent inferiority, asking why it was that Europeans were able to oppress Africans and Native Americans, I recommend this book.

Would you withhold it from them in order to prop up your belief that the races are identical?

Haha, this sounds just like the "women don't want to work with computers!" If this is your tack, step one is ask what they want, not assume that their desires just happen to perfectly match your social biases.

Satellites are extremely vulnerable. They would be the first thing to be hit in case of a major war, this was already predicted in this thirty-year-old book

The reason Europe decided to build Galileo as a direct civilian alternative to US' GPS was to prevent the US from shutting down all navigation in case of a conflict

Satellites are extremely vulnerable. They would be the first thing to be hit in case of a major war, this was already predicted in this thirty-year-old book

Am I the only one that sees value in preserving important parts of our history for future generations?

There are only two options here:

1. Either there are enough people like you to help this museum with their donations.
2. Or there aren't enough people like you and the museum will close.

The third way you'd like (and your current pro-Democrat sig is what makes me think so) is to tax everyone (whatever the rest of us think of this museum) and help this museum with those taxes. Fortunately, this approach is not an option in this case...

And let me preempt any switch to my own persona by saying, that I did know about this place for a while, having read both a documentary account of American/British cryptanalysis during WW2 and Neal Stephenson's fiction on the subject.

I do find BP fascinating, but I'm not sure, I would go to visit it in person on my visit to UK. There are place which one must see, BP is something one must read about...

Am I the only one that sees value in preserving important parts of our history for future generations?

There are only two options here:

1. Either there are enough people like you to help this museum with their donations.
2. Or there aren't enough people like you and the museum will close.

The third way you'd like (and your current pro-Democrat sig is what makes me think so) is to tax everyone (whatever the rest of us think of this museum) and help this museum with those taxes. Fortunately, this approach is not an option in this case...

And let me preempt any switch to my own persona by saying, that I did know about this place for a while, having read both a documentary account of American/British cryptanalysis during WW2 and Neal Stephenson's fiction on the subject.

I do find BP fascinating, but I'm not sure, I would go to visit it in person on my visit to UK. There are place which one must see, BP is something one must read about...

With a liberal reading of "if it works" you're right. You can say that if the code is functional, reliable, usable, efficient, maintainable, and portable, then it is of high quality. But this is a circular definition, because this is how software quality is defined. As somebody else posted earlier, the quest for quality can lead you to an endless motorcycle trip on America's back-roads.

Just last night I once again visited the Top 100 Sci-Fi List of Books and checked their list for any new books that moved up and their Major Series list to decided on what I will be reading next on my month long visit in Europe. After that I hit Google to look for eBook torrents for the books and series that I am interested in and I came across this Top 100 Sci-Fi Books Torrent with most of the books from the list and many of them as complete series.

The books are in Microsoft Reader's LIT format so if you have a compatible PDA device that you use for reading then you're set or you can always convert them out to HTML with Covert Lit utility (GNU licensed and open source to boot) that runs on a number of OS's and takes care of the work. Also I would recommend the Haali Reader for Pocket PC platform if you want a good full featured reader that can read text files directly inside .zip files without uncompressing and it saves your place in many books even on phone resets in case you have a PDA type phone that you can read on like I do.

I am exactly in the same boat as you, I also read the Hyperion Cantos but I couldn't get through the first book the first three times I tried to read, because the story lines were so diluted and all-over-the-place, that if it wasn't for the single story about the village of people and the Crucifix of Resurrection I would have dropped this book like a stone and missed out on the rest of the great series. That first books almost soured me to the Top 100 Sci-Fi List because it was one of the books there that was highly recommended, and there should be a warning placed on it.

Also, I personally prefer to read books as eBooks but I also like to own the best ones as mass print paperbacks so I usually buy them en mass as complete series from Barnes & Nobel since they seem to be a less sleazy company than Amazon. Also, just as a reminder don't bother with the Amazon Kindle eBook reader since you can't put your books on it without uploading them to Amazon and anything you buy to put on the reader is only licensed to you and you do not own the books you buy.

Writing up a reply to this question makes me look at all the books on my shelf with fond memories of the adventures that I read about. If you haven't already read these then check out the Dune series for deep sci-fi, and the Dune prequel books by Herbert's son if you like lighter fiction in the same universe, Ender's Game series, Vorkosigan Saga for action packed episodic sci-fi, and the other series mentioned in the links above.

Enjoy your reading.

I've been a long-time science fiction fan and this has been THE book for me each year, in filtering out the diamonds from the shit.

Amazon is usually a good place to start and failing that, try Bookfinder.com