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his earlier works were total classics. RIP.

It's understandable that, as he got older, his energy to write faded, but it's a real shame that he let other people put his name on shoddy products that he essentially had nothing to do with. They say that the apalling sequels to Rendevous with Rama (an excellent work and a science-fiction classic) were basically entirely Gentry Lee's doing in spite of the prominent appearance of both names on the covers. When the sequels are so bad they can only tarnish the perception of the original (see Star Wars).

This news is sad, but I hope that younger generations today will go back to the early works, ignoring all of the later publication, and see just how visionary a writer Clarke was.

http://www.amazon.com/God-Hates-Us-All-Slayer/dp/B00005NV8K/

You're right that if you know one C-style language you know them all, and in order to expand your development skills you should learn other styles of languages. However, a major problem is that there aren't so many references for non-C-style languages as there are for C(++), Java, Python, and Ruby. Though Lisp is something all developers should encounter, most Lisp books on the market are antiquated. (However, thank goodness for the relatively modern Practical Common Lisp by Seibel.) I wish there were more tutorials out there for the exotic languages that might really teach you new tricks.

Halo: Combat Evolved for Windows 2000 / 98 / Me / XP * Halo 2 For Vista

You were saying?

Anyway, you can not complain when a game is released on more platforms and sells more. That's the whole point, and it's what Halo would have done if Bungie were independent of Microsoft.

Better luck next time.

Halo: Combat Evolved for Windows 2000 / 98 / Me / XP * Halo 2 For Vista

You were saying?

Anyway, you can not complain when a game is released on more platforms and sells more. That's the whole point, and it's what Halo would have done if Bungie were independent of Microsoft.

Better luck next time.

"Listen" would be the theme for 1990.

In January Microsoft offered to make us a beta test site for Windows 3.0. We accepted their generous offer, but did little more than look Windows over. In hindsight, it is easy to see we should have done much more right away.

Some of us were ready to postpone OS/2 in favor of Windows, but the programmers in the OS/2 group, who had also been given the assignment of eventually creating the Windows version, were not ready to give up on OS/2. They were making good progress and hated the idea of starting over... They wanted to believe in IBM, as did the rest of us. The failure of OS/2 meant having to play on a field owned and operated by Microsoft, with Microsoft making the rules.

In May Microsoft shipped Windows 3.0, and our worst fears became a reality. Just at the time we were decisively winning in the DOS word processing market, the personal computing world wanted Windows, bugs and all. To make matters worse, Microsoft Word for Windows was already on dealer shelves and had received good reviews. That little cloud on the horizon, which had looked so harmless in 1986, was all around us, looking ominous and threatening. IBM's strength and size were no protection. Not even an elephant could ignore the impending storm.

WordPerfect Office was turning into a big problem. The program was useful, but it had a few weaknesses. The directory services, which listed all the people on the mail system with their electronic addresses, could not hold more than one or two thousand people. The schedular, which could be used to put together a meeting, was slow and sometimes unreliable. Installing the program was a very difficult process.

1991...was our year to "think."

Our biggest [problem] was the continued delay in the shipment of WordPerfect for Windows. Just one week after Fall COMDEX in 1990, the Windows programmers informed us that the dates we had given...would be impossible to meet. ... We were in deep trouble.

We...took too long to make our experienced DOS programmers get involved. They could have helped a little more, but we had a hard time convincing them that the Windows project was more important than anything else. With sales still going up, many thought things were going too well to be concerned.

One big problem was getting all the different Office development groups to work together. By now we had teams for PC networks, for the Macintosh, and for UNIX, DG, and DEC machines. Unfortunately, none of the groups seemed to be willing to work out their differences.

Our long term success was, I thought, dependent on diversity. If the world was filled only with Windows machines, then Microsoft would have a tremendous advantage. If instead the world was filled with DOS, Windows, OS/2, Macintosh, and UNIX machines, we could maintain our advantage in the personal computer word processing market.

Our theme for 1992 was "focus."

We were...disappointed by the lukewarm WPwin reviews. The reviewers complained that the product was a little slow and a little buggy, and they were right. Long gone were the days when I could take a WordPerfect review home and be certain I would enjoy reading it.

We needed to get a cleaner and faster version of WPwin out the door, but it would take some time. Microsoft was heavily promoting DDE (dynamic data exchange)... In theory, if we wrote our program to support Microsoft's specifications, a WPwin document could give and receive information to and from other programs. Instead of releasing another version of WPwin right away, the programmers wanted to delay the release so the new feature could be included..

We were in a battle to the death w

Drew Curtis actually sums up the net's overall effect on journalism quite well in his book. Say what you will about Fark, and admittedly I originally wrote this book off as sophomoric and self-promoting drivel, but then I discovered it in the University of Pittsburgh Library, of all places!!!! Apparently, somebody in academic circles must've actually taken this seriously. And, to be honest, he actually makes a lot of very good points.

If you are looking to O'Reilly for Rails info, I'd rather recommend their Rails Cookbox , where you can immediately apply what you've learnt to real-world projects. Advanced Rails was just too abstract for me.

It is obvious that once the question 'Who should rule?' is formulated, it is very hard to avoid an answer such as 'the best', 'the most clever', 'the born ruler'.... But this kind of answer, no matter how convincing it sounds - because who would side with a government led by 'the worst', 'the stupidest person', 'the born slave'? - is of no use at all. It is not easy to have a government who relies absolutely on kindness and goodness. If we allow this to happen, then we have to ask, if the political thinking should not consider the possibility of a bad government, if we should not be prepared for the worst leaders but hope for the best ones. That leads to a new approach to politics, because it forces us to replace the question 'Who should rule?' with the question 'How should we arrange the political institutions so the bad and incompetent rulers will not be able to cause too much harm?
-- Karl Popper, Open Society and its Enemies

In the essay "Calvary in the Age of the Autarch" (collected in Castle of Days ) Gene Wolfe explains why in his far-future science-fiction epic The Book of the New Sun he had battles fought on horseback with some kind of genetically modified horse. They reproduce for you, they don't break down as stubbornly as machines (and can be used as dog chow), and they can graze instead of needing processed petrochemicals. I find that an intriguing notion, and I wonder when genetic engineering will get to the point that we can create new species to order.

Jorge Luis Borges wrote a fine manual on this. (Read This For Monsters!)

Maybe this will mean that people will eat less wheat and become healthier. Maybe it will mean that farmers find other food crops to grow, diversifying our food sources, and making people (and economies) healthier in general.

Gluten (the thing that makes dough dough) may actually be a genetic adaption to prevent animals from eating it. I know that people don't want to hear this news, but our farm subsidies and reliance on monolithic food crops is not only unhealthy, but unsustainable in the long run.

This is coming from a bread lover.

figure out how to make one with this book then really you don't deserve one.

1. Get Fusionable material...
2. Compress it or not (little boy vs Fat man...) compression needs less material but requires precision explosives.
3. Get something that produces fast neutrons.
4.Boom.

Now if someone could just post the documentation on tritium or hydrogen weapons I can get back to work...

The Los Alamos Primer: The First Lectures on How To Build an Atomic Bomb has been around for a long time. It covers the nuclear physics of the atomic bomb. Anyone with a bachelor's degree in physics can understand it completely (anyone else: unlikely). The nuclear part is the easy part. The hard parts of making an atomic bomb are (1) separating isotopes to make fissable material and (2) constructing the chemical explosives to generate enough compression to insure a good nuclear reaction. The item on Wikileaks is a rough sketch in the direction of #2.

Interesting. In Gene Wolfe's novella Seven American Nights (collected in The Island of Doctor Death ), the inhabitants of a post-apocalyptic America where some kind of nuclear radiation accident had occured repulse the narrator with their extra teeth. Perhaps your story in Analog is where Wolfe got the idea from?

This Slashdot story seems to be bringing up more associations with science fiction than usual.

This reminds me of that godawful late Beowulf Shaeffer story by Larry Niven "Procrustes" (collected in Crashlander ) where someone loses their head and an autodoc manages to grow one back. I mention this not hoping anyone would go read the story, but to provide a forum where other people who lost hours of their lives to late Niven can express their feelings and frustrations to a sympathic audience of people who did the same.

Here's the book; http://www.amazon.com/Secret-That-Exploded-Howard-Morland/dp/0394512979
and a background artcile by Howard on his deductions and something of the legal case http://www.fas.org/sgp/eprint/cardozo.html

oh yeah - even Greenpeace seem to have pretty pictures - wouldn't trust those guys to assemble one though http://archive.greenpeace.org/comms/nukes/fig05.gif

peter xyz

It is a matter of building a big enough ship

One of the major themes of Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy (namely the volume Blue Mars ) is that immigration into outer space cannot solve Earth's population problems. You could never move enough people off at once to counter the people being born at that same instant.

We don't stone people to death, we don't chop limbs off thieves, we don't have slavery anymore.

Reminds me of the Badonkadonk land cruiser.

Seriously, that design is stupendously atrocious. It looks like a blood-stained crib. There are a lot of ways to present modern server form factors in sexy ways; this is not one of them.

I'm surprised you didn't mention Crichton's Prey , that's a prominent recent example of evil nanobots.

You don't need an old WRT54G. You can buy a new WRT54GL.

The DDWRT firmware is awesome. Make sure you install the micro first, then you can upgrade to one of the other more feature-full versions from there. Although "micro" is a huge misnomer considering the amount of functionality it has compared to the default firmware. Also you will want to adjust the maxium ports and TCP/UDP timeout settings if you use P2P. Out of the box, torrents will kill your internet connection.

Hear, hear to the parent. "Conservative" and "Liberal" have come more and more to mean two sides of the same Remocrat/Depublican coin.
They're both wealth-destroying Socialists. They're both warmongering Fascists.

And leave it to Microsoft to place a flawed concept at the very center of the design. "Click the Red Elephant of you listen to Rush, or the Blue Donkey if you listen to Air America"

I've been out of the amateur radio hobby for nearly a decade, but I seem to remember issues of the ARRL Handbook dedicating plenty of space to antenna design. What is this guy's original achievement?

There are many parallels between modern America and ancient Rome. There's at least one book on the subject.

Why Michio Kaku may be a fine mathematician, I think his ideas of technological progress are often shaky. I remember reading his book Hyperspace as a teenager and getting really irked by his repeated and fairly unrealistic visions of godlike power in the near future (an irritation at least one Amazon reviewer shares).

Heck, for that matter, Frank Zappa talked about an almost identical idea in the interviews that became The Real Frank Zappa Book, published in 1990.

Anyone who reads this summary (without realizing that this is just a way to keep whaling under the guise of research) and thinks "dude, that's messed-up: I wonder what other shenanigans scientsts get up to?" should go read Elephants On Acid (and other bizarre experiments). It's a seriously strange book just chock-full of "they did WHAT? Dear Lord, *WHY*?" experiments. I thought it was interesting as a book because some of the experiments, I was like "cool, I've always wondered about that" when other people (my girlfriend, brother, best friend) were all "they did WHAT??!?" and likewise, they found meaning in other experiments that I thought were completely delusional. (Yeah, I'm saying the validity of experiments is relative.) There are some really truly gruesome experiments discussed in here, though, truly Frankenstein nightmare experiments done in the USSR, so it's not for the weak of stomach. But it's a great read.

What we have here is an organization that is losing in the distribution game. It used to be that casual piracy wasn't a big deal because it was inconvenient to try and copy a VHS tape. Now, it is super easy to duplicate *and* distribute it over the net.

So, instead of changing their business model where they can return the distribution power back their way *by adapting*, they're trying to inhibit or restrict the convenience of a high speed network. When are these people going to get a clue?

In the book Good To Great, Jim Collins points out one of the fundamental things that great companies have to do: the have to have the courage to face reality. The longer they ignore it, the more difficult it will be for them to turn things around. Some may say it's too late (I disagree), but they need a real culture change to transform.

I really hate this topic. But I feel obligated to respond to it every time.

Nobody, for some reason, can admit that BOTH are wrong, and probably share equal blame in the matter. The Israelis invades already occupied land and expects them to hold the Israelis sovereign because some ancient book says so, of course the Palestinians fought back. In this Israel is wrong. The Palestinians purposely targetting civilians is ALSO wrong. The Israelis near genocidal clamp down on said Palestinians is ALSO wrong. And so it goes.

My problem with this is when someone has the balls to criticize Israel they get branded either pro-Palestinian, or worse, anti-Semitic. To entertain a probable straw-man, don't say that EVERYONE does this, you rarely hear of the Israeli terrorists, or the Palestinian freedom fighters, these terms are just as valid this way, as the way they are commonly used thanks to the brutal tactics on BOTH sides. And yes, both sides can be looked on with sypathetic rhetoric, the Israelis are fighting for their existence, and the Palestinians are fighting against tyranny. Fine... To me this is an indicator that siding with one faction is impossible, since both are semi-justified, and semi-evil.

Neither side wants compromise, so bloodshed they shall get, and probably deserve.

The only point of policy I can come down on is that the U.S. has no right to assist either side. Either way we are left morally tainted and bloodied. This is especially true today when our support of Israel is a major contributing factor to the hatred of the West. I'd support which ever side decided to deal with things in accord with international law, and humanistic values, and for the time being it looks like neither even want to come close to this.

The only fair (albeit now dated) version of this conflict I've seen way David K. Shipler's Arab And Jew. Both sides are indoctrinating each other towards pure hatred and violence, there will never be a valid conversation on this until that stops.

Quote from Earth: "She took a subvocal input device from its rack and placed the attached sensors on her throat, jaw, and temples. A faint glitter in the display screens meant the machine was already tracking her eyes, noting by curvature of lens and angle of pupil the exact spot on which she focused at any moment.

She didn't have to speak aloud, only intend to. The subvocal read nerve signals, letting her enter words by just beginning to will them. It was much faster than any normal speech input device... and more cantankerous as well. Jen adjusted the sensitivity level so it wouldn't pick up each tiny tremor - a growing problem as her once athletic body turned wiry and inexact with age. Still, she vowed to hold onto this rare skill as long as possible."

Once again Sci Fi pwns reality...

I know I'm in the minority in general, maybe not so much here. I absolutely adore the "olde aenglish" style that Tolkien writes in. One of my favorite books is Gibbons "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire". If you can get through that with enjoyment, then Silmarillion, et al, aren't a problem.

I think some of this comes down to whether the reader is a history and/or language geek or not. History geeks love the "backstory" of Tolkiens world, they want to know who is related to who, what happened when, etc;. I just finished Ancient Iraq by Georges Roux. What a fantastic book. To learn the history of the birtplace of civilization, from around 4000 b.c. to around the birth of Christ has given me an entirely new viewpoint of the middle east.

One of Tolkien's many gifts was his ability to use different writing styles for different cultural groups and/or races in LOTR and his other books. He would use different "English" for the Rohirrim, for the Numenoreans, etc;. It's incredible. A good discussion of this is covered in the Tom Shippey book, "Author of the Century".

Just get a drive and rip them on your computer and playback via MythTV. You are already recording and playing back HD TV content, right? http://www.amazon.com/Liteon-Reader-Black-Retail-Pack/dp/B0010ZWYF8

Instead of spending $600 on a Tivo Series3 device, you can buy a cheap $200 computer, use MythTV to replicate what the Tivo would offer, put Firefox and the VideoDownloader extension on there to watch all the YouTube videos you want on your own time.

I know you are probably referring to his stories on Middle-Earth. However, he did write other things, and one can only be described as a children's story:
Roverandom
You may want to check wiki on this as well. It mentions several other children's books. However, I have only read the one.

Love Psychedelico, Help!

Sung in pretty decent English, as Japanese singers go. It's not a flawless American accent... but then, neither is the original, no? :)

Farmer Giles of Ham would work passably well as a children's book. Tolkien wrote that and a few other short stories in a conventional narrative style rather than the Old-Testament-like style of the Silmarillion.

http://www.amazon.com/Farmer-Giles-Ham-Adventures-Worminghall/dp/0618009361

Sorry Mr. Peck, but that was the most schizophrenic review I have ever read :) I can't decide if you love it or hated it. Perhaps you should stick to reviewing the latest Walkman or Digital Photo Frames :)

"it is just not written in a manner that is going to connect well with a modern audience"
- Shall I suggest the comic book, or the new blog version perhaps ? (just kidding)

I've read nearly everything in the series, and this book matches up well to the style and stories that you'll find in The Similrillion or Lost Tales. If you enjoyed those, especially Lost Tales, you may enjoy Children of Hurin. Yes, it's not a style that mimics the latest J.D. Robb, but then it isn't supposed to, that's one of the things that appeal to me about the text.

Christopher Tolkien thanked Guy Kay in the acknowledgements to The Silmarillion , but it's never been clear to be what Christopher Tolkien was forced to fill in on his own in this posthumous works. What about The Silmarillion or this work is from the hand of another fantasy writer?

I think the Eee hits a pretty small niche - not quite laptop status (too limited to be a main computer), and a bit bigger than a SmartPhone (bigger screen, bigger keyboard). Kind of like an oversized PDA.

Personally, I prefer my i760 and Eleksen for quick checks (i760 browses nicely over broadband wireless, whipping out the keyboard for longer e-mails is simple, and the combination is VERY small and lasts for 6+ hours of browsing/e-mail on a single charge), and a decent laptop to serve as my main computer.

EeePCs and the like really are targeted at a small niche; folks expecting it to take over the low-cost end of the laptop market are missing the point of a laptop - it's a replacement for a full blown computer, and usually serves as a person's main computer. The EeePC comes up short in that regard.

Casino security has been used not only to ensure there is no theft or violence in the venue, but also to record the appearance of people who win a little bit too much, so that muscled goons can find them and warn them to cut it out. I was shocked how, in Bringing Down the House , the MIT blackjack team shows how no matter what disguises they tried, surveillance could establish that it was them.

If I remember correctly, the first portable mp3 players were portable CD players that could play CDs and mp3-encoded CD-ROMs.

Not all of them, though my first one was: a Rio Volt SP90. It doesn't see much use anymore, but it came in handy last summer providing background music for a convention booth...rather than risk getting my iPod swiped, I threw a few hours' worth of music on a CD-RW and played it on a boombox through a tape adapter.

http://www.amazon.com/Sensory-Science-RaveMP-2100-Player/dp/B00000SG9M

Been so long, I forgot.

Is this a trick question?

Net Applications gives Linux 0.65% of the market. In line with the Intel exec.
Operating System Market Share for February, 2008 W3Schools is more charitable. But in their stats Linux has shown 1% growth in four years, Vista 7% growth in one. OS Platform Stats

If you develop for the XBox 360 you get the PC market as a bonus - and vice-versa. If you are in the big leagues you get a say in the evolution of DX10 hardware and software.

After ten years, there is a still a market for the boxed set of Half-Life 1 There is no incentive for the gamer to migrate to Linux if any game he has ever owned can play under XP and Vista with a minimum of tweaking.

The high end video card becomes the entry level card in two or three years. It will have a mature set of drivers. Gaming on a budget is perfectly feasible even under Vista.

Uh, while you're at it, could you re-release their their Christmas Albums on something that's not flexi-disc? You know, so I don't have to pay some bootlegger for a piece of crap copy? I have one track from that legally off of the Free As A Bird (track 04) single.

Also, it's evident that you have hundreds of hours of takes by The Beatles in your vaults. I know it takes time to master them but doesn't greed and insane fans willing to pile money at your feet dictate that you should continue with the releases of music similar to the Anthologies? I mean, you could distribute this stuff on iTunes or (preferably) Amazon too without ever having to do the physical packaging and I would probably have to buy it.

You seem to be greedy as all hell so I thought I'd throw that out there and hope you publish everything recorded by what is considered by many to be the greatest musical group to ever live.

What other graphic novels might you recommend that validate the format?

Validate it? To what standard? Does art ever really need validation?

But I'll take a shot in the dark. In particular, it's hard to know what works will help give a medium respectibility until a great deal of time has passed so that people can reflect upon them. The really important works are the ones that will still be read decades down the road. Graphic novels are still relatively young, so it's harder to guess what will matter in the future. Still, here are a few works that I think will likely make the cut:

Maus is the obvious one. A sort of biography, it covers the author's relationship with his father and his father's experiences as a Jew in Poland during World War II.

Barefoot Gen is a the story of a boy living in Hiroshima during World War II. While fictional, it was written by a survivor. It shows the nationalism of the period and the horror of the aftermath.

These are also quite good, but I'm not sure they'll prove to be timeless. However, they're good enough I think they're worth checking out:

New York: Life in the Big City is an interesting work, filled with the sort of slices of life that a skilled columnist or short story writer can capture.

Mom's Cancer , a relatively recent autobiographical work about the title, originally published online.

In yet another sign that the U.S. is facing behind in space technology, the Japanese space agency unveiled its own mechanical creation, assembled from smaller, lion-like devices. See footage of it in action.

I take it that this is your review

It's nowhere near the top by any sorting option. You probably should have linked to it.

-Peter

Kingdom Come