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In the UK (and possibly elsewhere) a bigger bar to getting a job can be incorrect information in the Police Criminal Records Database (errors in up to 10% of records they say) as personel departments trust this kind of information more than a search on Google.

This is not a problem local to the UK. Inaccuracies of police and government records are a much much more serious problem then anything your prospective employer can potentially find about you online (unless you're really fucked up). David Burnham's Rise of the Computer State goes into great detail on this topic for those who are curious.

These are 2 books I have learned from:
Cascading Style Sheets: The Designer's Edge
The CSS Anthology : 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks
I also joined Community MX which helped loads in leaning all the strange browser quirks. Those people have it nailed and are very helpful.

These are 2 books I have learned from:
Cascading Style Sheets: The Designer's Edge
The CSS Anthology : 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks
I also joined Community MX which helped loads in leaning all the strange browser quirks. Those people have it nailed and are very helpful.

Every time there is a story on CSS here, we always get a bunch of people who say CSS is useless and that table tags are the only way to design a site. I'm always amused by people who have been living under a rock (or haven't updated their skill sets) for the last couple of years. CSS Zen Garden should stand as solid proof that CSS works, and can produce some gorgeous and highly usable results (and check out the Zen Garden's Zen of CSS Design ) for a description of general aesthetic.

CSS is broken in some obscure ways, I've encountered some limitations with styling elements with a certain xml:lang in documents whose body tag has a different xml:lang, but for 99% of sites, it's ready now.

If you're a balloon company, and your most difficult choices are what color balloons to make and who to get to ship them, then sure, rule by committee. Anything more complicated needs leadership.

Here's a non-referral link to that book: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374292795/

Doesn't matter what you do, the technology you've helped create has flattened the world and made people living anywhere in the world your competition. Sticking your head in the sand won't make the issue go away. You've got to figure out where your place is in this world - where you bring enough value to your employer or your customers that they're willing to pay your price. The same thing happened during the industrial revolution; the ones that thrived were the ones that woke up early enough and were willing to adjust.

Read the book: The world is Flat
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0374292795/sr=8-1 /qid=1149950227/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-7396187-3543345?_ encoding=UTF8

It's a bit long-winded but is an important read for anyone in the tech industry.

If someone wrote a book about the making of DNF, I'd probably buy it with real money. I like books like that, my fave is 'tales from development hell' about big name movies and how they can take 10+ years to get made.
Link:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1840236914/sr=8-1 /qid=1149948630/ref=pd_bbs_1/102-6139415-7876916?_ encoding=UTF8
Especially now I got the hell out of mainstream gamedev, its fun to look back on the car-crash that is gamedev management and have a good chuckle. Masters of doom was a good book, but the best bits are about Daikatana :D
Maybe they should bundle a 'making of' book with the game. Thats the only way a lot of people would be tempted.

In the words of David Noble:

(Corporations) "have the ability to transfer production from one country to another, to close a plant in one and reopen it elsewhere, to direct and redirect investment wherever the 'climate' is most favourable [to business]. . . . [I]t has enabled the corporation to play one workforce off against another in the pursuit of the cheapest and most compliant labour (which gives the misleading appearance of greater efficiency). . . [I]t has compelled regions and nations to compete with one another to try and attract investment by offering tax incentives, labour discipline, relaxed environmental and other regulations and publicly subsidised infrastructure. . . Thus has emerged the great paradox of our age, according to which those nations that prosper most (attract corporate investment) by most readily lowering their standard of living (wages, benefits, quality of life, political freedom). The net result of this system of extortion is a universal lowering of conditions and expectations in the name of competitiveness and prosperity."

- from Progress Without People

If I might make a comment about the general nature of forecasting. Predicting the future is often wrong, but it can be immensely inspiring. After all, isn't that why so much science fiction is popular, because it shows us a future without the problems that plague us today? Or take, for example, futurist Ray Kurzweil's book The Age of Spiritual Machines , which gives a glimpse of an awesome shift in human capabilities.

Of course, just thinking about what crap you can sell people in the coming years degrades the act of forecasting, but futurism does have its place in making us all think loftier things.

You should try the book: Your Money or Your Life. They basically make the argument that you only need to reach the point where your monthly investment income is more than your monthly expenses. It is fairly easy to do if you are willing to do something like live in the basement of your house and rent out the rest of the house. It's not for everyone but that isn't saying it can't be done.

People who bought Bill Hicks - Rant in E Minor also bought... pretty much anything else by Bill Hicks.

Damn, that man's a marketing machine.

Yes, I've previously paraphrased the Churchill quote to capitalism/economics myself, too.

Equally, I think paraphrasing Ghandi's western civilsation quote for free trade capitalism is quite insightful: good idea, somebody should try it (because sure as s##t nobody is trying it now)

Even Thomas Jefferson warned about the corporate aristocracy, especially banks. John Adams didn't like them either, neither did the other Thomas, Thomas Paine. Simply there were some who thought big businesses would prove to be bad. The USA has come a long way from then, even from the America Alexis de Tocqueville wrote of in "Democracy in America" when he traveled the USA in the 1820-30s.

The book by Niven and Pournelle isn't my favourite story about the threat of asteroids. Michael Flynn's future history beginning with Firestar has an entrepreuner give all she can into private space endeavours out of a fear of The Big One coming. Too bad our current space entrepreneurs are motivated mainly by profit, some fear might do some good.

but Nintendo has gone to the "Mario" well a bit too much lately and the poor sales of the cube shows it.

Check the Japanese sales charts. In the last two weeks, New Mario Brothers for the DS has sold ~1,000,000, one of the (if not THE) fastest selling games ever. The demand for (good) games with Nintendo characters is there. Look at the Best Buy and Amazon.com US sales ranks for some more evidence... (NMB is currently the top selling console game on Amazon.com, and #2 at Best Buy).

Mario's (and other Nintendo properties) over- or under- exposure isn't what hurt the gamecube. The console is neck and neck with the Xbox 1 for global sales (it vastly outsells it in Japan), and that is primarily based on Nintendo 1st party games (Mario, Zelda, etc). What hurt the cube was a lack of any games BUT the Nintendo games (with a few exceptions like RE4. People that love Nintendo games bought the cube. But to compete with the PS2, they needed people who like GTA, Tekken, Elder Scrolls, etc... That's where they failed with the cube.

As far as them exiting the hardware business, they have already stated they will not do that. And why would they? They came out of the last generation with tons of profits - both on the cube and the GBA. Again, the Cube is worldwide neck and neck with the Xbox - and they made a profit on every console sold, unlike MS. If they only do just as well this time, they will still be making profit (and it looks like they might do a lot better than last time).

Right now, they consistantly dominate Japanese sales charts with the DS and DS games - DS games regularly occupy 50% or more of the games charts, and the DS outsells every other console or handheld handily. This is giving them a massive war chest, not to mention a lot of fans of the DS who may be easy to sway over to the Wii... On the flip side, if the weird controller scheme is bad, it will hurt them. And if they don't get 3rd party games, that will hurt them too.

Either way, though, Nintendo isn't going anywhere.

http://www.timpaterek.com/

This is the manual. Feel free to ignore his editorial comments if you like. They don't affect the rest of the material (he has some very strong opinions on what constitutes "custom" frame building).

Proteus Frame Building Handbook

This is the one that got me started back in the 70s. It's a good starter book written expressly for the person who just wants to experience building a frame or two without having to mortgage the house for tools.

Good luck finding a copy though.

Listmania:Bicycle Frame Building

Here's a Listmania page. Looks like a very good, pretty compreshensive collection if you intend to get a bit serious about it.

Manufactured wood and manufactured iron (steel), the wonder materials of all time and they get very little respect these days. I don't get it.

KFG

http://www.timpaterek.com/

This is the manual. Feel free to ignore his editorial comments if you like. They don't affect the rest of the material (he has some very strong opinions on what constitutes "custom" frame building).

Proteus Frame Building Handbook

This is the one that got me started back in the 70s. It's a good starter book written expressly for the person who just wants to experience building a frame or two without having to mortgage the house for tools.

Good luck finding a copy though.

Listmania:Bicycle Frame Building

Here's a Listmania page. Looks like a very good, pretty compreshensive collection if you intend to get a bit serious about it.

Manufactured wood and manufactured iron (steel), the wonder materials of all time and they get very little respect these days. I don't get it.

KFG

Nice idea, but the trickle off a solar panel is particularily well suited to recharging batterys, and a solar panel the size of a car roof won't put out that many watts.

For more information read the book: Solo: Life With an Electric Car by Noel, Perrin

It's quite entertaining.

"The Last Unicorn" can be found at most video retailers for about $10 USD. I don't know about the leprechaun's gold or centaurs though (but I think I saw some in "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe").

As for "pantechnicon", perhaps there just isn't an American equivalent. As I understand it, it was originally the name of a building that housed a furniture warehouse (the reasons the building had that name are too complicated to go into), then the carriages used to haul furniture from that warehouse, then trucks of a type you might use to haul furniture. These trucks have many uses, but you most often see them used as moving vans — excuse me, removal vans. And indeed, Wikipedia, in its usual sloppy fashion, claims that panopticon is a "disused British word for removal van". Judging from Google, the word is anything but disused.

A would like to point out that you can buy very useful documents from the IDC through Amazon. For instance, this 10 page PDF entitled Attacking Application Infrastructure Configuration Complexity can be downloaded for a mere $3,500.00 USD. Yeah, there's around 8600 over priced market forecasts and analyses available on Amazon.

If you're looking for a 1 page PDF with romance, adventure & a criticism of day to day life through the eyes of an electronic device, check out the IDC's No PSP for the Holidays for a mere $750.00 USD. As you can see by the customer comments, this is a very satisfying purchase.

Does anyone actually pay this much money for these? If they do, how can they be sure that IDC knows the future?

Assuming the IDC does know what it's talking about, I find their analysis of mobile operating systems to be the most interesting. This is an area of OSs (or real time OSs) where Microsoft is losing footing. Symbian seems to be increasingly dominating that market with Microsoft & Linux neck and neck. By the way, don't bother to pay the $3500 USD for that article, the press release will suffice.

With the IDC also predicting mobile device sales to skyrocket, what does this tell you about Linux? Maybe Linux has lost the desktop war but it doesn't matter because the future is filled with concentrations on extremely small mobile devices and the servers that they connect to?

A would like to point out that you can buy very useful documents from the IDC through Amazon. For instance, this 10 page PDF entitled Attacking Application Infrastructure Configuration Complexity can be downloaded for a mere $3,500.00 USD. Yeah, there's around 8600 over priced market forecasts and analyses available on Amazon.

If you're looking for a 1 page PDF with romance, adventure & a criticism of day to day life through the eyes of an electronic device, check out the IDC's No PSP for the Holidays for a mere $750.00 USD. As you can see by the customer comments, this is a very satisfying purchase.

Does anyone actually pay this much money for these? If they do, how can they be sure that IDC knows the future?

Assuming the IDC does know what it's talking about, I find their analysis of mobile operating systems to be the most interesting. This is an area of OSs (or real time OSs) where Microsoft is losing footing. Symbian seems to be increasingly dominating that market with Microsoft & Linux neck and neck. By the way, don't bother to pay the $3500 USD for that article, the press release will suffice.

With the IDC also predicting mobile device sales to skyrocket, what does this tell you about Linux? Maybe Linux has lost the desktop war but it doesn't matter because the future is filled with concentrations on extremely small mobile devices and the servers that they connect to?

A would like to point out that you can buy very useful documents from the IDC through Amazon. For instance, this 10 page PDF entitled Attacking Application Infrastructure Configuration Complexity can be downloaded for a mere $3,500.00 USD. Yeah, there's around 8600 over priced market forecasts and analyses available on Amazon.

If you're looking for a 1 page PDF with romance, adventure & a criticism of day to day life through the eyes of an electronic device, check out the IDC's No PSP for the Holidays for a mere $750.00 USD. As you can see by the customer comments, this is a very satisfying purchase.

Does anyone actually pay this much money for these? If they do, how can they be sure that IDC knows the future?

Assuming the IDC does know what it's talking about, I find their analysis of mobile operating systems to be the most interesting. This is an area of OSs (or real time OSs) where Microsoft is losing footing. Symbian seems to be increasingly dominating that market with Microsoft & Linux neck and neck. By the way, don't bother to pay the $3500 USD for that article, the press release will suffice.

With the IDC also predicting mobile device sales to skyrocket, what does this tell you about Linux? Maybe Linux has lost the desktop war but it doesn't matter because the future is filled with concentrations on extremely small mobile devices and the servers that they connect to?

Some modern historians say that Franklin's kite lightning was a hoax, designed to electrocute European plagiarists. Others still believe that lightning can strike a kite, run down a string, and energize a key, without the kite, string and kite flyer bursting into flames.

Objectivists...too much drinking of the Kool Aid.

I think Objectivism can be fairly described as a cult. My opinion that it is was strengthened after reading Walker's The Ayn Rand Cult (Open Court, 1998), which shows how instead of being a beneficial and coherent philosophy, it has ruined lives, broken up marriages, and caused people to blindly trust Rand's judgement even when she had no idea what she was talking about. It's just obscene that Objectivists must, according to Rand and her heir Leonard Peikoff, despise Immanuel Kant, even though Rand had never read any primary sources on Kant's philosophy.

Language is perception

That idea is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and has been dismissed by mainstream linguistics. See Language Myths , ed. Bauer and Trudgill (Penguin, 1999), and note the chapter about how changing meanings is a normal part of diachrony.

There are a number coming out on the 20th of June, look on Amazon. Just search for "Blu-Ray".

Since you seem to know the direction the studios intend to move despite what logic and common sense would dictate I figure it is incumbent on you to find proof the ICT flag will be used anytime in the near future, or even simply to propose a rational alternate theory as to why they would enable the flag at a time when they are trying to grow marketshare. You seem only to be stalling.

Are folks really so impatient that waiting a few seconds to input a command is just intolerable?

One of the biggest complaints about Final Fantasy VIII was that summons took forever. They were a major part of the game, one couldn't do without them, and it was just the exact same animation over and over. Long battles can be interesting if the animation is varied, if the unexpected can occur, but since in a Final Fantasy game one gets in hundreds of battles, it would be a lot of work for the producers to come up with enough different scenes for the player to stay interested.

I really wish there were battles nowadays where you could just tape down a button, go to sleep, and wake up to find you've reached a very high level, as in Final Fantasy VI (III in the U.S.)

I wonder how long it will be before a law school (probably also in Florida) adds this to its book list.

Well son, you've gone and got yourself in for a battle.

Heres what you gotta do:

study up http://www.worldrps.com/ and get this http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743267516/ theofficiaroc-20

You may want to get some fancy RPS gear, http://www.worldrps.com/index.php?option=com_wrapp er&Itemid=53, and dont bother bringing that rolex, it will slow you down

Also, we knoe those who ignore history are doomed to repeat its mistakes, so why dont you read up on the history of the game too, could come in handy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rock%2C_paper%2C_scis sors

I'd recommend The Official Rock Paper Scissors Strategy Guide.

We're going to see ever more rapid acceleration of technology at an increasing rate that will one day leave Moore's Law in the dust, and the impact on society promises to be phenomenal. Just the notion of ever-more-sophisticated portable gadgetry is already altering society in very interesting ways (and yes, some of those alterations are annoying or inconvenient--oblivious cell phones users and so forth). But with the way these gadgets are going, we're going to rapidly outstrip the imaginations of Star Trek writers in terms of the capability and utility of such ubiquitous and powerful devices. I look forward to having the electronic equivalent of a Swiss Army knife (and yes, I'm sure there's going to have to be some clever work done on improving the user interface on such units--but there are inventive types out there working on that sort of thing). It all promises to be very interesting.

So what I'm to gather is that a new technology advances at rates different from ones set forth in arbitrary "laws" relating to different technologies?

Moore's Law stated that not only would components increase in power, but that they would also decrease in size. See Brock's Understanding Moore's Law (CHF, 2006), a recent book that cleared up some confusion I myself had about the trend. So, the shrinkage of integrated components discussed in the article is entirely relevant.

Save yourself $7.65 by buying the book here: The Art of SQL. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Save yourself $7.65 by buying the book here: The Art of SQL. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

. . .but I didn't NEED to go to school to learn this . . .

Who said anything about going to school? I am a vociferous advocate of the library fine model of education. Most of what you learn in school these days, even at the tertiary level, is just plain wrong. At least in math, physics and chemistry we still require that you test and verify what's in the text book at the lowest levels.

. . .you actually could have a book on theory - for each one of them.

And here it is, written from the point of view of the practioner:

Practical Issues in Database Management

Perhaps if you read it you will gain a better understanding of the very concept of "theory." Your comment reveals you to be a bit weak on this point.

KFG

I did the same search at B&N.com and got the page for this book. Can't buy what I can't find.

As to more recent writings on the subject I'm aware of none. I ran another search but came up empty handed. Were I to pursue the subject I'd be more interested in copyright law and court findings. For example if strong DRM were to allow media outlets to effectively gag dissent by claiming copyright over content, much as patent trolls attack technological innovation.

Unfortunately my own readings are even more out of date. If I were to cite one author who best investigated the fickle nature of socities when faced with change, I'd have to go with Norbert Elias. His work on the impact of manners and civility on society and it's power structures is very insightful.

"His work focused on the relationship between power, behavior, emotion, and knowledge over time. He significantly shaped what is called process or figurational sociology. Due to historical circumstances, Elias had long remained a marginal author, until being (re-)discovered by a new generation of scholars in the 1970s, when he eventually became one of the most influential sociologists ever."

You might think his work dated and only slightly related to the subject of your post but his insight into the availability of knowledge and human nature is universal to the point of being relevant to change generally and specifically. I enjoyed his work very much.

Then of course there's the granddaddy of media impact, Marshall McLuhan. You see what I meant about my readings being even more dated.

cheers

The book is not only cheaper at Amazon, but occasionally through the Third Party Sellers offering books there, one can get a mint book for pennies in comparison to the full price.

In any event, Amazon's patents shouldn't intimidate Free Software fans, as the GNU project ended their boycott since there was no sign of danger.

What documentation issue?

There are boatloads of documentation available. Ever hear of The Linux Documentation Project? Plus, most distributions offer lots of very good documentation. Why there was a Slashdot story just two days ago about the excellent Ubuntu documentation. There are no fewer than 600 books available about Red Hat distros available for sale on Amazon. Not to mention that Red Hat Enterprise Linux itself includes lots of lots of documentation and most of it is available on the Web gratis. Plus the hundreds of open source apps that include very good documentation with their package. Have you actually read the documentation and free books available on the Samba website? It's darned good!

Any perceived documentation issue is Laura DiDiot's head.

For full disclosure, I work for the publishing company, but this is a really fun read.

If you want to read about the rise of Nintendo you should really check out this book:

The Ultimate History of Video Games

I can really recommend it. It describes how everything got started, from pinball machines to arcade machines to the first home entertainment systems. Also very nice to read how all of the Atari developers where smoking drugs all day long, and how their annoyed managers hated that :)

Hell, the twelve step process is *based* on that- read the 12 steps. The first step is admitting you have a problem. The second is giving up and praying to god to solve it for you, rather than acting like a man and taking responsibility for yourself.

SOS, the foremost non-"higher power" recovery system, admits that research shows that both religious and non-religious approaches work equally well, so I don't see why you should malign AA. You might abandon you FUD if you were to simply read through AA's "big book".

Here you go. Lots of concrete proposals. All of them are being implemented in one form or another by highly successful companies today. They empower the individual and the community, and represent a vast improvement over the current, "the rich get tax breaks and the poor get fed into the mulching machine" system.

Happy reading.

A1:A7 was a necessary (computer) memory-saving expediency --- http://www.bricklin.com/history/intro.htm

Not necessary now though --- http://www.simson.net/clips/91.NW.Improv.html

At the very least, I know of one accounting firm which requires only named ranges be used in calculations --- (cited in ) http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0534 371353?v=glance

William

IMHO, that is one of his worst stories. See his collected works and you'll see that he was capable of much more. His efforts in verse are especially admirable.

Save yourself $20.35 by buying the book here: User Mode Linux. And if you use the "secret" A9.com Instant Reward discount, you can save an extra 1.57%! That's a total savings of $20.89, or 38.58%!

Save yourself $20.35 by buying the book here: User Mode Linux. And if you use the "secret" A9.com Instant Reward discount, you can save an extra 1.57%! That's a total savings of $20.89, or 38.58%!

Hell, I just saw a Cirque du Soliel show in Vegas and spent $125 for two hours of entertainment. So clearly entertainment should be priced at $60 an hour. So clearly HL2:E1 should have been about $240 and the original HL2 is worth more than $600. My copy of Freakonomics, which I got for $18 and took me about 3 hours to read is grossly underpriced; why wasn't I charged ten-fold more?

Perhaps on the other hand, why are video games so expensive? Why does anyone buy them at all? Instead of dropping $50 on the newest video game (about 15 hours of entertainment), you could buy 6 paperback novels (about 24 hours)!

Different forms of entertainment isn't directly exchangible. You need to compare games to games. Market forces have set games at roughly $50 for 15 hours of play. That's what other games roughly charge. The competition for HL2:E1 isn't a few movies: it's Far Cry Preditor.

(And keep in mind that for both examples you gave, there are cheaper and quite popular options. I rent far more movies (about $3/movie; watched by 2 people) than I see in theatres. I purchase far more books in paperback than hardcover. I even sometimes use the library or borrow books from friends.)

There's plenty of WYSIWYG tools for Latex.

I'm always happy to see fellow TeX evangelists here. If you don't know about LaTeX yet, check out the TeX Frequently Asked Questions and discover the joys of a typesetting system that is not only high-quality, but free as in freedom and immensely extendable.

LaTeX's markup makes so much sense that a WYSIWYG tool isn't necessary, for even the man on the street can be just a productive with doing it up in a text editor. A good and free as in beer guide to the system is The Not So Short Introduction to LaTeX2e , though if you are going to be markup up lots of math (LaTeX's specialty) you'll probably want Graetzer's Math Into LaTeX since LShort doesn't cover it so much.