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• Becoming a Technical Leader by Gerry Weinberg. Gerry talks specifically about making the transition between being in the trenches and being a manager-type and just what you have to give up in the process.
• Journey of the Software Professional: The Sociology of Computer Programming by Luke Hohmann. This book is not nearly as well known (and read) as it should be; it's also a great source of references for hard research on IT development teams.
• The Mythical Man-Month (20th Anniversary Edition) by Fred Brooks. Just because anyone in IT management should read, understand, and believe this book. I deal with failing or failed IT projects for a living, and most of those failures occur for the same relatively small set of reasons.

• Becoming a Technical Leader by Gerry Weinberg. Gerry talks specifically about making the transition between being in the trenches and being a manager-type and just what you have to give up in the process.
• Journey of the Software Professional: The Sociology of Computer Programming by Luke Hohmann. This book is not nearly as well known (and read) as it should be; it's also a great source of references for hard research on IT development teams.
• The Mythical Man-Month (20th Anniversary Edition) by Fred Brooks. Just because anyone in IT management should read, understand, and believe this book. I deal with failing or failed IT projects for a living, and most of those failures occur for the same relatively small set of reasons.

• Becoming a Technical Leader by Gerry Weinberg. Gerry talks specifically about making the transition between being in the trenches and being a manager-type and just what you have to give up in the process.
• Journey of the Software Professional: The Sociology of Computer Programming by Luke Hohmann. This book is not nearly as well known (and read) as it should be; it's also a great source of references for hard research on IT development teams.
• The Mythical Man-Month (20th Anniversary Edition) by Fred Brooks. Just because anyone in IT management should read, understand, and believe this book. I deal with failing or failed IT projects for a living, and most of those failures occur for the same relatively small set of reasons.

One size does NOT fit all

Xen will squeeze VMware out. Anyway ZFS and virtualization are the two hot items. Throw in adaptable networks and the pictures complete.

Smart Environments: Technology, Protocols and Applications

I don't have any moderation points to add to Helevius' karma, but I can send my things for posting an informative article.

Its pretty clear to anyone paying attention that the fact that software vendors like Microsoft pay no price for security failures in their products means that they don't have much incentive to fix them (see Why are there still e-mail viruses? ). So I was inclined to agree with what seemed to be the theme of Geekonomics. But from looking at the quotes above and the authors blog, it's pretty clear that the author doesn't have much of a clue. He tries to excuse this by stating that, well, he's writing for executives, so he can't go into technical detail. This is really just an excuse for not putting the effort in to completely explain the problem. I am in the middle of reading David Leavitt's excellent novel The Indian Clerk , about the Indian number theorist Ramanujan. Leavitt manages to clearly portray pre-World War I England, number theory and academic mathematics. The author of Geekonomics really comes off as yet another consultant whose writing a book to get those hourly fees from those very same clueless executives. I am glad that Helevius has saved me from buying this turkey of a book.

This Amazon.com review mentions Mr. Rice's opinions on open source:

Geekonomics reviewed by Richard Bejtlich:

As far as open source goes (ch 6), the author makes several statements which show he does not understand the open source world. First, on p 247 the author states "While a binary is easy for a computer to read, it is tremendously difficult for a person -- even the original developer -- to understand." This is absolutely false, and the misunderstandings continue in the same paragraph. Reverse engineering techniques can determine how binaries operate, even to the point that organizations like the Zeroday Emergency Response Team (ZERT) provide patches for Microsoft vulnerabilities without having access to source code!

Second, on p 248 the author states "The essence of open source software is the exact opposite of proprietary software. Open source software is largely an innovation after-the-fact; that is, open source software builds upon an idea already in the marketplace that can be easily replicated or copied." On what planet?

Third, on p 263 the author states "[O]pen source projects are almost always threatened by foreclosure," meaning if the developer loses interest the users are doomed. That claim totally misses the power of open source. When a proprietary software vendor stops coding a product, the customers are out of luck. When an open source software developer stops coding a product, the customers are NOT out of luck. They can 1) hope someone else continues the project; 2) try continuing the project themselves; or 3) hire someone else to continue developing the product. Finally, if the author is worried about open source projects not having an organization upon which liability could be enforced, he should consider the many vendors who sell open source software.

David Rice responds on his blog.

I'll admit their CLI is pretty crappy for file manipulation. However they have a rich set of instructions for system administration. In particular, their Active Directory (AD) CLI commands are actually much more useful than any GUI they provide for it. Heck, I have a 400 page book all about Windows system administration through the CLI (here)

That being said, I'm currently writing this on Fedora 8 so you should be able to guess my preference.

It was Neal Stephenson.

How do you fake anonymous lambdas?

"I don't really know much about Python. I only stole its object system for Perl 5. I have since repented." Larry Wall

But in case elaboration is desired, you don't see Python programmers going around saying, "Here, look at this. I really didn't 'get' Python classes until I read this amazing article," and then a week later, "I think I understood classes for a while last week. It was pretty cool, but you'd have to be crazy to use that stuff unless you had a really nasty problem." The two models may be the same at some level, but Perl's was expressed so poorly that simply explaining it for mere mortals was considered a major achievement. I could teach Python's object system to any of my colleagues in an afternoon, using the morning to brush up on the technicalities and plan my presentation. If I could do that with Perl, I'd be some kind of Perl God (like Damien Conway). Given that the fatal flaw with Perl 5 OO was its obscurity, and the biggest asset of Python OO is its lucidity, that quote from Larry Wall is, like many other things he says, absolutely shameful unless interpreted in whatever special ironic context he said it in.

(The difference between Python lambda fakery and Perl object fakery epitomizes the difference between the two languages. Python falls back on simple, universally-understood language features to provide a somewhat clunky, verbose, yet clear solution; Perl falls back on language wizardry to provide an obscure but concise solution. In most cases Perl achieves a much better tradeoff than it did in the case of objects.)

I prefer to hire people who are good at programming to write and maintain code I care about.

The U.S. system is absurd. Start with the fact that the U.S. and New Zealand are the only countries that allow prescription drugs to be advertised and go from there. Special interest groups have taken over the government. Policies are in place to benefit the largest campaign contributors, period. And that would be the biggest multinational companies. Small business and citizens are now serving a big business oligarchy. Naturally the biggest most profitable hospital chains would adopt this first. And naturally they will come up with a way to benefit their business allies. Until we vote for real change in Washington DC and our state capitals, this will continue.
Anyone who hasn't read the great sci-fi book Oryx and Crake, should get the book and get some real insight as to where we are headed: Corporate city-states where profit is the only value:
http://www.amazon.com/Oryx-Crake-Margaret-Atwood/dp/0385503857/ref=ed_oe_h

If anyone else has read Diane Vaughan's Challenger Launch Decision, he or she will know that launch schedule pressure from upper management was a leading cause of the rationalization of risk that NASA undertook to justify flying with known Shuttle desgign flaws. Hopefully, in this case, the NASA senior managers are not applying the same mindless schedule pressures that leads to quick fixes and mindless workarounds at the expense of long term safety.

read

Who Killed HealthCare?: America's $2 Trillion Medical Problem - and the Consumer-Driven Cure (Hardcover) Regina Herzlinger

http://www.amazon.com/Who-Killed-HealthCare-Americas-Consumer-Driven/dp/0071487808/ref=pd_bbs_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200766820&sr=1-1

Amazon has fifty books for sale with Cyberlaw in their title. None of them refer to this scumbag lawyer. The term is used as a generic, not a trademark.

My own book has a Cyberlaw tag on the Amazon cloud.

I think the reason the EFF is upset is that they suspect a lawyer who uses this type of scumbag tactics probably isn't a very good lawyer either.

Cyberlaw is a clearly generic. Anyone sending cease and desist letters should be disbarred.

Maybe you should try reading a little bit about how to suck less as a coworker.

"Theistic evolution is a good middle ground way of looking at things, but in believing it, you have to interpret the bible non-literally. That doesn't work for fundamentalists."

I'm sorry, but I don't understand why "non-literally" is a problem unless those same fundamentalists follow absolutely everything in the Bible, including such things as, oh, not wearing mixed fibre clothing, stoning adulterers, or truly believing that when Caesar Augustus decreed that "all the world should be taxed" the Bible really means the entire world. In my experience, what "literal" means to most people is a weak excuse for irrationality or for hypocrisy in what people follow versus what the Bible literally says. "Literalists" are usually highly selective and inconsistent with their "literalism", so why not on this issue?

If there are any *real* literalists out there, they are very rare indeed. An entertaining and informative example of the disparity between what some fundamentalists claim and what it would actually take to be a literalist is in the form of A.J. Jacobs "Year of Living Biblically".

Actually you might find those books given that Amazon has 3rd-party sellers selling used books. 50 years is a bit of a stretch, but in this case Amazon is not competeting with these stores anyhow.

Furthermore, Amazon does have many books that are hard to find anywhere else. Perhaps only available from the publisher otherwise. If I pop into a local bookshop and ask for a copy of Comparative Syntax of Old English And Old Icelandic: Linguistic, Literary And Historical Implications I am going to get a rather blank stare.

transhumanism?! you sound like one of the bad guys in "That Hideous Strength". It's Christian science fiction. You might enjoy reading it if religion is something you just don't care about and not something you absolutely hate.

Do you have any evidence that atheists buy more technology? I wouldn't assume that. My church is full of people with fancy computers and PDAs and other gadgets.

The best tool is your brain, applied liberally. Here's some thoughts to put in it

Feathers, Michael. Working Effectively with Legacy Code, Chapter 16 especially.

Spinellis, Diomidis. Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective, Chapter 10 lists some tools for you.

My own thoughts now. First, don't trust the comments, they are probably outdated. Second, if it's a big code base, forget the debugger. Write some little unit test cases that exercise the sections of code you need to understand, and assert what you think the code is supposed to do.

Finally, unless you are cursed with a codebase which is not kept in version control (in which case, ugh, time to start the jobhunt up again maybe), then take a look at the revision history. See what changes have been made to the area you are working on. With luck, someone will have put in a revision message that points you towards greater understanding of why a change was made, which will in turn nudge you towards knowing the purpose of the section of code that was change.

The best tool is your brain, applied liberally. Here's some thoughts to put in it

Feathers, Michael. Working Effectively with Legacy Code, Chapter 16 especially.

Spinellis, Diomidis. Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective, Chapter 10 lists some tools for you.

My own thoughts now. First, don't trust the comments, they are probably outdated. Second, if it's a big code base, forget the debugger. Write some little unit test cases that exercise the sections of code you need to understand, and assert what you think the code is supposed to do.

Finally, unless you are cursed with a codebase which is not kept in version control (in which case, ugh, time to start the jobhunt up again maybe), then take a look at the revision history. See what changes have been made to the area you are working on. With luck, someone will have put in a revision message that points you towards greater understanding of why a change was made, which will in turn nudge you towards knowing the purpose of the section of code that was change.

The downward statistical trend in US education begins with the secularization of schools in the 60's. Also, creationists tend to home-school their children, and home-schooled children seem to outperform their peers in public school. (I say "seem" because there are some issues in regards to data collection.) So, your first bullet point doesn't hold H2O.

I haven't received abstinence-only education, but I got the "safe sex" course taught the pro-prophylactic crowd; it seems to operate under the delusion that "you're gonna do it anyway" -- I guess it's a good thing they don't use that logic about murder, huh? "Johnny, if you're going to go for the jugular, make sure to sharpen your knife!" It's not unlike the pre-criminal reasoning that's helping to throttle American society (P2P, security at airports, tax laws, etc.) Maybe both sides have a screw loose, I don't know.

As for the War on Drugs: it's too bad this book is out of print, but an excerpt can be found here. It details the most successful drug enforcement agency in the US... and it was killed by the FBI in order to start the War on Drugs. Let's face it, liberals won't be able to end the WOD without conservatives' help, and this book provides the reasons that conservatives would listen to.

Yes, those phenomena -- "causality, chaos, and random interactions" -- are often used as arguments against the existence of God; but they are insufficient to disprove it, and depending on how one looks at them, can be viewed equally easily as manifestations of God's will.

GP prefaced his statement with "I believe", not "I have proved". Faith is the decision to believe. GP has decided to believe that God directs such phenomena; you have (I'm guessing) not decided to believe so. But either decision is a judgment call. GP is not trying to convince you. Please accord him, and others like him (like myself), the same courtesy.

Your other point -- the argument from evil -- is one that is hotly debated, and decidedly troubling. But counter-arguments have been made by finer minds than mine, if you're really interested in the question.

There are a number of books out there by and about Fischer. If you're looking just for a book involving his insights into chess My 60 Memorable Games is a great work by Fischer.

We warned, tho, it's not for the casual chess player. I read it at a point when I studied a lot of chess and considered myself (and was considered by others) to be a pretty good chess player. As far as chess books go it's a pretty hard read. Also note that according to one of the Amazon reviewers that there are several editions of this book. I have a 1st edition copy so YMMV by which edition you pick up.

In my experience in Germany at least, the prices of books are entirely fixed by a cartel BY LAW and it's illegal to sell them below that cartel's set prices. Pretty sad in a country that values learning so highly.

I have two links for you amazon.de and amazon.com. 49.95€ versus 118$ (which is 80€) for the same frigging book. Heck, it's worse because the German version has been translated. Care to explain? I guess the European system does make sense when you value learning. (The English version is 80€ on amazon.de too, but you guessed surely guessed that, otherwhise I could make money by buying it here and sell it to US citizens)

Oh, and this is not an exception... It's pretty much the rule.

http://www.amazon.com/Asking-Right-Questions-Critical-Thinking/dp/0132203049/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200654681&sr=8-1 So many people are unaware of how to process information, evaluate it for quality and authority, and then integrate it into their own opinions and other resources to articulate a coherent thought. Great resources posted above (Asking the Right Questions) as well as the systematic literature review that "stranger_to_himself" posted above.

These types of laws were appropriate to that society during that period in human history. I would recommend Scott Hahn's, A Father Who Keeps His Promises as further reading: http://www.amazon.com/Father-Who-Keeps-His-Promises/dp/0892838299/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1200637021&sr=8-1

Toshiba DR-2 DVD Recorder/Player with Simultaneous Play and Record

There was a time for me when this was much different. I used to have a Humax Tivo/DVD-recorder combo unit that let me burn off shows from my Tivo to DVD-R at faster than real time and still watch other stuff while I did it (it burned in the background). But, thanks to the paranoia of the studios/networks/cable-companies and the DRM-laden standards for digital cable and HDTV, there is now no such combo unit made that can take a cablecard or record HD programs (sadly, I had to abandon my old Humax when I got digital cable a while back).

Thanks MPAA, cable companies, and networks!

Every time there is a story about the Semantic Web here, people trot out the old "It's utopian vaporware" nonsense. The technologies that stand behind the term "Semantic Web" have existed for nearly a decade now and have produced much fruit. Just see Visualizing the Semantic Web by Geroimenko & Chen (Springer-Verlag, 2nd ed. 2005) which has plenty of real-world examples of using these technologies to get real work done.

Sure, the average joe isn't producing semantically meaningful markup when he uses his whizbang Web 2.0 sites, but then again what the average joe produces isn't worth all that much anyway. Even if the Semantic Web doesn't expand to include all Internet activity, it has and continues to do much good.

For me it is a surprise that the book was published by the mainstream publisher Addison-Wesley. Do they release expect many sales of what initially seems like a shady book?

BTW, there are players that can play both formats, they're just very expensive (especially after this price drop, more expensive than a Blu-Ray player (e.g. PS3) + HD DVD player).
For example, http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B000YB2IPK/panandscathed-20... which I found by simply googling for dual format high def dvd player and finding an announcement that had a link to Amazon.

If you want to understand the difference between a tech demo and a movie - and how the evolution of a story teaches you mastery of your craft - you need look no farther than this: Pixar Short Films Collection: Volume 1 [Blu-Ray $20]

Crossbows and Catapults is available (see http://www.amazon.com/Battleground%253a-Crossbows-Catapults-Chest-Starter/dp/B000NPSVEO for one EXPENSIVE place to buy it...)

Start collecting any receipts you can find as well. They almost always have the full customer loyalty card number on them. Feel free to register as many as you can as soon as the system comes online. Have fun creating interesting shopping lists for people. Be creative!

Microsoft may not have the formats formally specified anywhere...Many, many years ago, shortly before my book was published, Microsoft actually wanted to hire me to write the official documentation for the Segmented Hyper-Graphic (SHG) file format because their own in-house documentation for the format was for an even older, unsupported version.

I mean, think about it, if you write code to store a document, do you sit down and write the byte-layout of that file? I suppose you could, but it's generally not necessary for the coders. My guess is that MS doesn't even have this stuff lying around. They'd probably have to have someone actually piece it together from the code.

The U.S. government has often used its "cooperation" with the governments of other countries to corrupt those governments. See, for example, Coups Arranged or Backed by the USA. Most or all of that corruption happened for profit, such as kickbacks of U.S. government foreign aid. When the governments of Israel or Pakistan buy weapons from U.S. manufacturers using money from "foreign aid", that is embezzlement of taxpayer money.

The Cooperative Research History Commons is very valuable for those wanting to do their own research.

The poorly edited but very interesting free movie Zeitgeist explains in three parts that 1) People who believe in myths are easily manipulated. 2) It is common that people are manipulated through fear. 3) The U.S. monetary system is controlled for the profit of a few individuals. (Also see The Creature from Jekyll Island, an excellent but not perfect book about financial corruption.)

The U.S. government has killed directly or indirectly caused the death of an estimated 11,000,000 people since the end of the Second World war, partly by invading or bombing 25 countries.

Yep.

It's pretty sad.

DRM-free music was supposedly what slashdot readers want? Or was it just 'free' music all along, and the DRM thing was just a way to claim justification for piracy while it lasted?

People complained that they pirated because the music had DRM, and the DRM is going. People complained the music was too expensive, and itunes led to way lower prices. Now what is the excuse?

It's not the End of the World, but you can see it from here, and if we're not careful Things Could Go Poorly. The problem is the smartest people around think "technology" will fix the "resource" problem. Given unlimited energy and resources, perhaps this is true, but we don't live in a world where there are unlimited resources. So, if we're at the top of the heap - look around you: this is as good as it gets.

RS

`That Hideous Strength`, by C. S. Lewis.

Sadly, this hilarious joke will be too old a reference for most of you kids. *sigh*

Wrong! It was the first thing that I thought of when I read the headline.

Bill Cosby = Wonderfulness.

The problem is there has not been a properly mastered CD released for nearly a decade so most of you dont have a clue as to what a good one sounds like.

The problem is there has not been a properly mastered CD released for nearly a decade so most of you dont have a clue as to what a good one sounds like.

With the advances in biotechnology, it's amusing to think that Larry Niven in his Gil "The Arm" Hamilton stories (collected in Flatlander ) foresaw a future where you'd get the death penalty for just about anything just so that the state could rip out your organs for donation into someone needing it. In Niven's future history, the use of organ transplants ends only hundreds of years in the future when alloplasty ("gadgets instead of organs") is developed. Now, in just 2007, we're getting close to synthesizing real organs instead of transplanting or making little machines.

For me the perfect scheme would be to attempt to change the criminal's life outlook through compulsory education. If they cannot change themselves, then they should go in exile. So, if a member of a community offends the community's customs, they will have to leave that community. This way they cannot re-offend, and nobody pays for them. We could even have internationally designated places to send criminals from every country there, and let them alone out of our societies. Of course this should be done only for criminals who cannot become lawful citizens again.

Go read up on the history of prisons, penal laws and human nature. Then go read up on the history of Australia. Actually, read The Fatal Shore by Robert Hughes who goes into all of these things and many more. Hopefully you'll end up a tad wiser. Hint: Your idea doesn't stand a snowball's chance in Hell of working.