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We're just a cog in the machine and our contributions are not worth that much - as an individual. The elitists make their money because they know how to take all of us low-value cogs and turn us into a high value machine. That's why they are where they are. And I hope to join them.

What you suggeested is a nice fantacy, but I'll take my porn anyday!

Read this book for a better explanation ;-)

...is The Flickering Mind by Todd Oppenheimer. Reviews a number of studies regarding technology in classrooms.

No, I'm actually serious.

Don't come off as 100% nice and friendly. Don't try and be kind and giving (off the bat). Be 80% rude, demanding, and heartless.

Once you've achieved that image, crack lots of jokes. About yourself, about others, about politicans, about whatever.

Honestly, the women I've made friends with in the workplace have taken this approach. The bitchiness immediately scares away lovesick puppies, but a good sense of self-deprecating humor will eliminate any barriers (bitchiness-based or gender-based) between yourself and your coworkers.

Obviously, this will require a thick skin, and furthermore, it requires a degree of self-consciousness, and an element of manipulation. I recommend reading The Art of Seduction. It's very important to establish a balance; you want people to be interested in hearing what you have to say, whether it be humourous, cruel, or serious. At the same time, a bit of evil makes it quite clear to all around you that you're not interested in love/sex.

Oh, and when you end up going out to drink with coworkers, leave before people get totally trashed (if they do that). Insenstive, sexual, cruel things come out of groups of drunk men, and no amount of threating/training/manipulating is going to change that. It's a part of many men's lower psyche that has simply not evolved out of the human brain yet, and large amounts of alcohol lower the sociological barriers surrounding this dark morass.

we had this thing called "stores" ... Amazing, yes?

Amazon, no.

It's a bit dated, and written for MBAs rather than geeks, but Games Mother Never Taught You is still an interesting book. Not always accurate, even in its day, but still insightful.

I back up to Jungle Disk, a free slick front-end for Amazon S3 that lets you use it as a disk drive. It works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and there's GPL'd code that lets other people develop alternative compatible front-ends.

Cost: $0.15 / gigabyte, and my data is replicated in several datacenters on more than one continent.

The publishers thought for years that it was too risky to let authors put books online but they are gradually learning that this isn't so. Putting a book online often increases its sales; more people read it and those who find it useful often go buy a copy.

Don't like ebook hardware? Then build your own. In a week you'll want something with a BETTER feel than an actual book like the
RCA Rocket Reader.

Size doesn't matter (capacity). These days it need only be wireless and web-based. Point it to your own non-DRM server collection.

Ten seconds loading time if your home-built ebook reader stores one full title; instantaneous if it only grabs a chapter in realtime.

$400? For an extra one hundred you can get a 100gb PVR I understand flash memory is more expensive than a real hard drive, but it's not like hard drives are incredibly huge or unreliable in most cases, that cool factor surely diminishes when you are paying a bunch of extra money just to have it on your keychain versus putting it in your pocket.

god could: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1401902995/102-70 47761-1125748?v=glance&n=283155

10.99 GBP United Kingdom Pounds = 20.9513 USD United States Dollars

If you think it's cool to think about, definitely check out The Ancestor's Tale by Richard Dawkins, which does exactly that. Tells a lot of great stories, I learned some fascinating stuff about species I had no clue about.

Save yourself some money by buying the book here: OpenGL Distilled. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Save yourself some money by buying the book here: OpenGL Distilled. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Of course Jack the Ripper didn't have violent Internet porn! It was all telegraph networks back then. ;-)

The review here links to B & N, but it seems that Amazon has it rather cheaper.

The Republican War on Science

Despite the inflammatory name, the book doesn't assert that Republicans are inherently anti-science, but it is a chronicle the past few decades of politicization of science, and how even though Liberals do their own part to misrepresent science, the overwhelming lions share of open distortion percieved by the overwhelming majority of scientists has been unfortunately solidly Republican. It's a rather impressive, well-documented book that I highly recommend showing a trend of scientific limitations and games like today's story.

Ryan Fenton

"DRM is a reality and to deny this is to be simply ignorant of current trends in media playback software/hardware stacks."

DRM technology is the flip side of the anti-social using consumer technology to pander to their baser instincts.* Not everyone does it, and you'll certainly hear examples of those who don't abuse technology. However the anti-social and the social don't wear tags identifying themselves. And enough of the anti-social are doing it that it causes problems for society at large. (That and the fact that the social aren't doing anything about it)

BTW a couple thing to keep in mind when discussing copyright and DRM.

One copyright infringement isn't something that the "poor" consumer does to the "rich" corporation. It's something that a majority does to a minority. Aka the "Everybody Does It!" reality.

Two DRM isn't just whatever the media companies come up with. It will represent itself in much more pervasive ways by more common people. e.g. the use of Flash to make it more difficult for some to lift content wholesale. There's also watermarking by individual artists who have archives on the web. The same artists will also have only thumbnails online(1), and leave the good stuff for purchasers. Musicians will only offer snippits online, and leave the good stuff for paying customers. The E-book industry will grow very slowly because dead trees is still the best ARM (analog rights managment). There are plenty more examples, and you'll see more as the anti-social become ever bolder.

Three basically copyright infringement hurts more, the smaller the one it's done to. And it does nothing to correct the present relationship between artists and media companies.

Four. Note the irony inherit in the position of using technology to infringe, while strongly dismissing the usage of technology to prevent infringement.

*Another way to look at it is that technology removes social inhibitions towards incorrect behaviour.

(1) Some also put a "bug" right in the middle of said art making it only useful for evaluation purposes.

In other words he slowly transitioned from young serious author to mature exploratory author to dirty old man.

You overlook For Us, the Living, which while (ironically?) not published while he was among the living, was written before any of his other novels or short stories were published. Perhaps this resembles the now-common practice of novice amateurs writing Mary-Sue themed wank material, before getting serious. (There's a reason it spent over half a century unpublished.

Heinlein was always a dirty old man. He just stopped bothering to hide it after Stranger.

yes, there are uncrippled machines that can do what you want (and then some). you probably have one sitting on your desk

if you're running under linux, you've got a couple options. kino (http://www.kinodv.org/ will allow you to capture live raw video (plus sound) from a standard dv camera with an ilink (aka 1394a) connection. it takes a little effort to get setup, but it's worth it. you'll then want to use ffmpeg to re-encode the files so that they're less huge and then save the encoded version.

if you have analog cameras, a $50 capture card (we use ati's all-in-wonder) can act as a frame grabber --- it may take a little finagling to get the sound working, but once it's all hooked up you should be good to go. use xawtv to preview and make sure that everything is behaving as expected, then use ffmpeg to capture the video. make sure you encode at fairly high bit rate and be careful about what combinations of codec and containers you choose (in particular, you probably want to stick to msmpeg4v2 encoded .wmv files if you intend the video to be played back on windows machines). if you've installed something like VLC on the playback machines, you can use more interesting codecs like h264 and still achieve quite impressive playback quality at much lower bitrates.

there are ways to do similar things in windows, although i have much less experience doing so and tend to use developers tools (like graphedit) to put together the directshow filters that will capture video and sound from some source, encode, mux, and then output the file. i'm sure that there are pieces of software out there that can do this. if you have access to some it people, writing your own should be fairly easy (there's a handy book on the subject here: http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Microsoft/dp/073 5618216/sr=8-1/qid=1156903037/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-273 5593-2181510?ie=UTF8)

if you're not inclined to build your own solution, virtualdub http://www.virtualdub.org/ may be able to help you. i haven't used it myself, but it's a pretty widely used app.

the one thing to bear in mind with all these proposed solutions is that you're going to want to make sure you've got fairly big and fast disks and quite a lot of space free. you're also going to want to make sure you've got a reliable backup strategy in place since you no longer have the luxury of the original tapes. if you have any other questions, feel free to email me: (my slashdot user name) 'at' yahoo(dot com).

Availability: This item will be released on January 30, 2007. Pre-order now. Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.

Discontinued by manufacturer: Yes

I don't know how HP got ahold of his patents!8-))

It's about time music is sold from a single retailer worldwide, online.

You mean like this one?

Closest I can find on Amazon right now without spending more than 10 seconds looking. But I belive you can find them in different color temperatures with a little more effort. Only uses 36 watts. http://www.amazon.com/150-Watt-Replacement/dp/B000 13VM6C/sr=8-1/qid=1156886866/ref=sr_1_1/103-363414 9-8977438?ie=UTF8

You use 150-watt lamps? Try this 42-watt CF. Or perhaps you'd like to get even more light than your current lamp, and still save energy with this 40-watt CF. Just because the article focuses on the 60-watt replacements doesn't mean the others aren't out there -- they just use more electricity, just like a 75 watt incandescent uses more electricity than a 60 watt.

You use 150-watt lamps? Try this 42-watt CF. Or perhaps you'd like to get even more light than your current lamp, and still save energy with this 40-watt CF. Just because the article focuses on the 60-watt replacements doesn't mean the others aren't out there -- they just use more electricity, just like a 75 watt incandescent uses more electricity than a 60 watt.

I think there is a think geek product that does this for you.

Hmm not on think geek but Amazon has it. Only works for the computer but combine it with some power bars and you could saeve some energy

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000BSN1CA

Dollars to donuts says the OEMs will repeat their "Win98 upgrade" coupon deal. At one point we had the option to purchase a "Windows 98 Upgrade Option" with DELL computers running Win95 in early 1998.

It also appears that Amazon is selling pre-releases. You can give the "anticipation of things to come" for Christmas instead of actual presents!

Where? Even if that's too much for you, it comes with just about every new PC.

As the AC suggested: "Avoid hyperbole and unsubstantiated claims".

bad memory.....it's the ML-1210, still on the original cartridge too.

Picture is here.

http://www.amazon.com/Microsoft-Windows-Vista/dp/B 000HCTYSU/sr=8-1/qid=1156864945/ref=sr_1_1/104-349 7884-5607157?ie=UTF8 says that the product is discontinued by manufacturer :)

Just go to Amazon and see the prices in USD.

Wow $399.00 for the Operating System... and, how much is the hardware?, and what can this Operating System can do?
I guess we (in Mexico) will continue to get it the Aye! way, it would be stupid to think that people will pay $400 for Windows when they payed $300 for the computer.

Ha!

Has anyone checked out "Ajax And Php: Building Responsive Web Applications (Paperback)" If I can only afford one of these books, should I get this one or the one reviewed here on /.

I'm currently reading Unweaving the Rainbow, by Richard Dawkins which makes the same argument: Newton "unweaving the rainbow" (understanding its formation) should only increase our poetic sense of wonder.

It's interesting that you picked the SSC for your example.

John Cramer (a physics professor at the University of Washington) wrote a book entitled Einstein's Bridge. It's what he calls "hard science fiction", about how the SSC was actually built and resulted in an invasion by a hostile intelligence. The protagonists somehow travel back in time and manipulate the political process so that the SSC is never built.

The state-of-the-art has benefited from Microsoft's 333 pages of Internet Standards and Protocols as well as their upcoming, 400+ page Guide to Defect Prevention

Similarly, all those "Dummies" books have allowed applications to become not only more complex, but less obvious. On the original Macintosh, all functions were accessable from menus. Now it's considered acceptable to have functions you can only reach from some wierd key combo, one not necessarily easy to find out about.

Now every application seems to have an associated thousand-page book full of rituals and taboos. (Many such books are reviewed favorably on Slashdot. But I digress.) The "menu system" for many applications now consists of 1) look up how to do it in strategy guide, 2) follow button-pushing recipe blindly. Buy the book and learn how to add footnotes to your documents!

Even Web sites now have books. There's Google for Dummies. Then there's Building Your Business with Google for Dummies, which is apparently about search engine "optimization". There's MSN for Dummies, AOL for Dummies (of course), Yahoo for Dummies, eBay for Dummies, and Myspace for Dummies. Remember when web site navigation was supposed to be self-explanatory?

What went wrong?

Similarly, all those "Dummies" books have allowed applications to become not only more complex, but less obvious. On the original Macintosh, all functions were accessable from menus. Now it's considered acceptable to have functions you can only reach from some wierd key combo, one not necessarily easy to find out about.

Now every application seems to have an associated thousand-page book full of rituals and taboos. (Many such books are reviewed favorably on Slashdot. But I digress.) The "menu system" for many applications now consists of 1) look up how to do it in strategy guide, 2) follow button-pushing recipe blindly. Buy the book and learn how to add footnotes to your documents!

Even Web sites now have books. There's Google for Dummies. Then there's Building Your Business with Google for Dummies, which is apparently about search engine "optimization". There's MSN for Dummies, AOL for Dummies (of course), Yahoo for Dummies, eBay for Dummies, and Myspace for Dummies. Remember when web site navigation was supposed to be self-explanatory?

What went wrong?

Save yourself $5.95 by buying the book here: Beginning Google Maps Applications with PHP and Ajax. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Save yourself $5.95 by buying the book here: Beginning Google Maps Applications with PHP and Ajax. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

"Mainstream media just takes orders from corporate headquarters and assumes that filesharing is bad and costs them money."

Do they? Every single one? Down to a man and woman? Past, present, and future? And since we're on the topic of generalizations (which BTW school should have taught you is bad). What makes you think that illegal copyright infringement is confined to anyone "Big"? What makes you think it's confined to Books, Music. Games or Software? How about when people copy wholesale articles to slashdot, without attribution? (not that that would make it OK). Or when people "borrow" graphics, video, or audio from personal websites without so much as even asking (let alone ignoring the "please don't copy" message most put up).

I've recommended this book in the past and I'll recommend it again since most here think that "doing something wrong" is strictly confined to entities slashdot doesn't like.

Couldn't you just counter it with something like this?

Wait...

You're telling me. One time I accidentally clicked on something like this and my recommendations were skewed for months afterwards.

1. An interpreted language gives instant syntax feedback, which is really important for newbie learners.
2. An object-oriented language teaches better encapsulation and abstraction thought processes than a functional language like C; therefore, I wanted something OO. Python's classes have a significantly lower barrier to understanding than Java's or C++'s.
3. Python is freeware, which means that the kids can legally install the interpreter at home and work at home on their code. Not so for Visual Studio or most other C++ frameworks that allow students to get graphics up and running.
4. I wanted my students to be able to create GUIs and even games. Python has lots of packages available for that which are easier to use than corresponding Java or C++ packages.
5. Documentation and forums are online and accessible to students.

1. An interpreted language gives instant syntax feedback, which is really important for newbie learners.
2. An object-oriented language teaches better encapsulation and abstraction thought processes than a functional language like C; therefore, I wanted something OO. Python's classes have a significantly lower barrier to understanding than Java's or C++'s.
3. Python is freeware, which means that the kids can legally install the interpreter at home and work at home on their code. Not so for Visual Studio or most other C++ frameworks that allow students to get graphics up and running.
4. I wanted my students to be able to create GUIs and even games. Python has lots of packages available for that which are easier to use than corresponding Java or C++ packages.
5. Documentation and forums are online and accessible to students.

Pacemakers indeed; a suicide bomber can have a good deal of explosive surgically implanted into him, replacing most of his bowels, for example, or one lung (as larger organs that are not mandatory for survival.) He'd need to live on injections of glucose for the rest of his life, but that's hardly a long time; he could board his flight mere days after the surgery. A similar scenario was described in the Gap trilogy by Stephen R. Donaldson; in his version the assassin had his blood replaced with an explosive that was still functioning as blood, more or less, just enough to carry him through the mission.

You should look at this, then. Python has reasonably nice packages that are much easier to program than the equivalent Visual blah packages. And the default, Tkinter, is cross-platform.

Ditto. I took a community college class, and they had us learn Karel, C, and Karel++ (Karel as an object-oriented language). Karel is similar to Pascal, and Karel++ is similar to JavaScript. For younger kids like this, it will do an excellent job of teaching how to use conditionals and loops, as well as commands and functions. The one thing it lacks is the ability to work with numbers (though Karel++ can do specific numbers of iterations) Plus, the idea of using robots will probably be interesting to the kinds of kids that would be interested in this. Also, I would definitely not recommend C or Java or anything like that, I think that it would be very difficult for them to grasp the ideas of different types of variables (int, long, float, char, etc.)

Amazon.com book link I'll admit that you don't get much book for the money, but they should be pretty cheap used.

In the best case, everything they type will have meaning and value to them. Instant feedback is also a plus. That means your best bet is a dynamically typed languages with a REPL. Many other posters have suggested languages/environments with convenient access to graphics; from my own experience, I would say graphics are nice but far from essential. That's your call, though, since you know the kids better than any of us do.

Here's a suggestion that may be a bit... out there. Teaching Haskell to kids might be risky, but it's guaranteed to be easier than teaching it to adults, especially experienced programmers.

Norm Augustine published a law relating the behavior of software to the rest of the physical universe. Quoting his most excellent book:

Augustine's Law XVII, the Law of the Piranha, has its origin in the fact that many contractors are devotees of the "Big Bang" Theory of Software Development, a policy which eats money by the bushel. For its explanation it borrows a concept from high-school physics known as "entropy":

Software is like entropy. It is difficult to grasp, weighs nothing, and obeys the Second Law of Thermodynamics; i.e., it always increases.

The contractors Augustine refers to are aerospace/defense contractors, though the Law of the Piranha applies universally to software development projects without regard to their nation of origin, market sector, or profit motive. Norm Augustine was the Chairman and CEO of Lockheed Martin Corporation for many years. He also served as the Chairman of the National Academy of Engineering. He earned his Bachelor of Science and Master of Science degrees in Engineering from Princeton University.