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Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
Data Structures and Their Algorithms
Operating System Concepts
Joe Celko's Data and Databases: Concepts in Practice
How to Design Programs: An Introduction to Computing and Programming
Programming Ruby (2nd. Ed.)
Agile Web Development with Rails

+ some book on data communications and networking

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
Data Structures and Their Algorithms
Operating System Concepts
Joe Celko's Data and Databases: Concepts in Practice
How to Design Programs: An Introduction to Computing and Programming
Programming Ruby (2nd. Ed.)
Agile Web Development with Rails

+ some book on data communications and networking

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
Data Structures and Their Algorithms
Operating System Concepts
Joe Celko's Data and Databases: Concepts in Practice
How to Design Programs: An Introduction to Computing and Programming
Programming Ruby (2nd. Ed.)
Agile Web Development with Rails

+ some book on data communications and networking

Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software
Data Structures and Their Algorithms
Operating System Concepts
Joe Celko's Data and Databases: Concepts in Practice
How to Design Programs: An Introduction to Computing and Programming
Programming Ruby (2nd. Ed.)
Agile Web Development with Rails

+ some book on data communications and networking

I suggest Agile Web Development with Rails.

It fascinates me that people still deal with PHP at all.

PS: If you're stuck with PHP, I seriously feel for you.

Games. I want to play games. The Mac does not support games other than WoW.

list of top-selling Mac games

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/4685 12/ref=br_ca_/002-7889068-1177637

Items sold by Amazon.com LLC, or its subsidiaries, and shipped to destinations in the states of Kansas, Kentucky, North Dakota, or Washington are subject to tax.

The Innovator's Dilemma by: Clayton M. Christensen http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0875845851/002-91 22322-8829606?v=glance&n=283155/

"...willing to spend $750.00+ for a fucking coffee maker"

Kubrick never asked Ligeti for permission to use his music, and the composer was very unhappy when he found out. He filed a lawsuit against MGM, but later had to settle out of court for a paltry sum (just $4,000 or so). The joke in Steinitz's biography Gyorgy Ligeti: Music of the Imagination goes that Ligeti once met an MGM employee who said that Ligeti was mad to file the suit in England, where it would go nowhere, instead of in the United States.

Kubrick never asked Ligeti for permission to use his music, and the composer was very unhappy when he found out. He filed a lawsuit against MGM, but later had to settle out of court for a paltry sum (just $4,000 or so). The joke in Steinitz's biography Gyorgy Ligeti: Music of the Imagination goes that Ligeti once met an MGM employee who said that Ligeti was mad to file the suit in England, where it would go nowhere, instead of in the United States.

Kubrick never asked Ligeti for permission to use his music, and the composer was very unhappy when he found out. He filed a lawsuit against MGM, but later had to settle out of court for a paltry sum (just $4,000 or so). The joke in Steinitz's biography Gyorgy Ligeti: Music of the Imagination goes that Ligeti once met an MGM employee who said that Ligeti was mad to file the suit in England, where it would go nowhere, instead of in the United States.

The average time for an ordinary CD to appear on p2p networks is about 6 minutes after it appears on store shelves.

I love how people gets statistics right out of their asses.

Do you work for any statistical analysis company? care to explain how did you get to those numbers.

Let me give you another number,

"The average time for an ordinary CD to appear on p2p networks is about -15 mintues after it appears on the store shelves"

Now, unlike you I would give you a reason, the majority of time I have downloaded something from a p2p network is when an album has not been released to store shelves but only some special demos, the case now can be Joe Satriani's Super Colossal which was released on March 14, 2006 but TPB had it uploaded on March 10 , 2006.

Of course my -15 mintues statistic is plain bullshit as yours but hey, at least I am giving a reason

"Most major label releases are produced in a studio that's got $500,000 worth of gear and an equivalent amount of studio build-out: sound proofing, acoustic treatments, isolation booths."

First, a million dollars isn't even going to touch the cost of a real movie. Second, that million dollars in sound equipment and studio is identical, and reused for thousands of albums, while most of the costs in movie production are reoccuring. The per album cost of a million dollar equipment/studio investment is likely going to be only a few thousand dollars. Your not going to get much of a movie at those rates.

My favorite example of overpriced CDs is

Maximum overdrive
Who Made Who

Nobody is going to convince me that the cost of producing the shoundtrack was even close to the cost of producing the movie AND soundtrack. It is also a safe bet that more copies of Who Made Who were sold than the box office tickets and DVDs combined. Combine that with the fact that we can be pretty sure that AC/DC was paid for the sound track, AND that most of the music was already written, and likely recorded before the movie was made. How can the HIGHER price be justified for the soundtrack alone? Because the can get away with it. People are more willing to pay unreasonable prices for music than for movies.

"Most major label releases are produced in a studio that's got $500,000 worth of gear and an equivalent amount of studio build-out: sound proofing, acoustic treatments, isolation booths."

First, a million dollars isn't even going to touch the cost of a real movie. Second, that million dollars in sound equipment and studio is identical, and reused for thousands of albums, while most of the costs in movie production are reoccuring. The per album cost of a million dollar equipment/studio investment is likely going to be only a few thousand dollars. Your not going to get much of a movie at those rates.

My favorite example of overpriced CDs is

Maximum overdrive
Who Made Who

Nobody is going to convince me that the cost of producing the shoundtrack was even close to the cost of producing the movie AND soundtrack. It is also a safe bet that more copies of Who Made Who were sold than the box office tickets and DVDs combined. Combine that with the fact that we can be pretty sure that AC/DC was paid for the sound track, AND that most of the music was already written, and likely recorded before the movie was made. How can the HIGHER price be justified for the soundtrack alone? Because the can get away with it. People are more willing to pay unreasonable prices for music than for movies.

I thought that too until I read this book. In fact, Al Qaeda is an actual, formal organization dating back at least to the early 90s with a central staff and certain rites of induction. And apparently they're quite selective. Which is not to say that all the jihadis are Al Qaeda members.

This book belongs in the humor section, not with the science fiction or (as I found it) engineering books. Its deadpan delivery is funny in a Monty Python "How not to be seen" way. The author recommends exploiting the very real limitations such robots might exhibit if they were based on today's industrial robot technology. Distort your silhouette, mask your thermal signature, do NOT anthropomorphise, etc. I learned a few things about modern industrial robotics .

This standard sized paperback is a quick read. It contains large print and is printed on unusually thick glossy paper with silver leaf edges. It doesn't feel like an ordinary book.

I haven't read the books but shouldn't the other book be a better choice for someone who just wants to learn PostgreSQL and not just together with PHP? Or am I missing something here? Is the PHP-book better? I don't care that much about PHP.

Save yourself $14.78 by buying the book here: No Nonsense XML Web Development With PHP. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Save yourself $14.78 by buying the book here: No Nonsense XML Web Development With PHP. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Don't you watch the movies. According to John Gall in his system books.

The Systems Bible: The Beginner's Guide to Systems Large and Small the latest.

When fail safe systems fail (you notice not if). It is the fail safe system that fails. If there is a code that can be sent, or a circuit within the unit that when energized by some source causes the machine to have approval for hitting a target, or to do the firing, then there is a possibility that that circuit will be energized from an unintended source at some time.

It only takes one such incident to say kill someone or for those who justify this type of technology, to kill the solders who own the device. You would be hard pressed to justify that sort of mistake.

But you might say, well we were able to kill so many other enemy (human being who happen to be on the other side of some political or power conflict (this week)), so that collateral damage, even though it was my son, was justified. Buu Rah...

    Get a life. War is not glorious and death is not a legitamate moral means to an end. Self defense possibly but I don't think one can argue that in any form currently.

Ah, there is more to it than just $.15 a month per GB.

Pricing

        * Pay only for what you use. There is no minimum fee, and no start-up cost.
        * $0.15 per GB-Month of storage used.
        * $0.20 per GB of data transferred.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/104-9335792-4 570331?node=16427261

See this description. Amazon is just offering a raw service with an API for developers to use. Amazon does not provide a WebDAV or similar interface. So it's not ready for home users, just yet... which, at that price, is a pity.

So for now, don't dump your .Mac iDisk.

Undoubtedly we will see independent developers offering home and SOHO backup tools that use A3... and undoubtedly they'll mark up the price.

If A Regular JOE is reading this article.... Does he Actually Understand This Stuff?

Decentralization
Asynchrony
Autonomy
Local responsibility
Controlled concurrency
Failure tolerant (Ok i know this one)
Controlled parallelism
Decompose into small well-understood building blocks
Symmetry
Simplicity

I'm sure REGULAR amazon customers will understand this. Taken From http://www.amazon.com/gp/browse.html/103-6578525-6 491034?node=16427261/

If you follow this link, you'll notice that they are supporting bit torrent.

Consider.

Today's your lucky day.

(Probably NSFW)

http://aws.amazon.com/s3

It's good to see more sites adding APIs to their web services (Amazon already has other web services, as does Yahoo and Google of course). It's becoming even easier for "mere mortals" to link together new technologies to make innovative new systems, but I wonder if this reliance on third-party systems comes at a cost, perhaps to reliability or security?

Red Hat is, I believe, a reference to one of Edward De Bono's books. De Bono is credited with inventing the term ' lateral thinking '.

Parent contains referral link. Here is the clean link

...coauthored an excellent book on PostgreSQL that was just published by Apress. The title makes it sound like it'd be a bit light, but it takes you all the way up to writing stored procedures, writing C programs that hit the database, using all the utilities, and so forth. I'm using PostgreSQL as a Jabber backend and the book has already proved useful.

Too bad they didn't talk about hitting PostgreSQL from Ruby... but since most folks are using ActiveRecord to do that, it's probably not a big deal. And if you use the Ruby/C client, it's quite snappy.

You are an idiot; Lee Harvey Oswald acted ALONE.

Read "Case Closed" by Gerald Posner. Besides, the CIA is way too incompetent to be feared.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0385474466/102-84 62968-1824962?v=glance&n=283155

We tend to rent games before we purchase them, and we came across this game while waiting for a good game to get in. The system is very similar to what is discussed for Spore, including manipulating the critters, as well as the menus for adding feet, weapons, etc.

Not sure about the the status of EA v. Sega, but the first line in the "Features" list talks about the "Patented Monster Editing System". The gameplay and graphics for Spore are very different, but the editing system appear to me to be too similar to be coincidence.

I wonder if most of the new features in PHP 6 will even appeal to most users. I started on PHP 4 with O'Reilly's Programming PHP and when PHP 5 came along, I didn't notice anything that was really missing. It's like Perl 6, there are already plenty of people who feel that what they have so far serves their needs, and there's not anything to improve upon.

It would be hard to truly compete against Flickr, since it offers a great deal of power that the user can find behind the simplistic interface. O'Reilly has already released Flickr Hacks . I doubt that this kid's creation is half as hackable.

The only thing that I don't like about Flickr is that it allows one to upload an enormous amount of photos each month, but limits the free account to three albums.

You make a great point - that many of the discoveries were not directly or solely 'muslim' - but yet they were.

As you point out, many of of the key cities that fostered discovery were the locus of many ideologies, that were allowed to coexist. And that is the key point, at the height of the Muslim world the Muslim world was tolerant of local ideas, and learned from them, assimilated them, wove them in to their writings and scientific understanding, grew them in to something more.

It is dangerous to view any culture as an island unto itself. At least any culture that isn't isolated on an island. The truth is that Islamic cultures, like others, went through varying times of acceptance and rejection of other ideas. And like other cultures, the times of acceptance led to the times of greatest innovation, while the times of isolation and rejection led to war and stagnation. A number of Karen Armstrong's books lend great insight.

Makes you think a little about where the US is.

a) It's the name of a song, not a movie.
b) Titles can't be copyrighted.
c) Trademarks can only be enforced against confusingly similar products. IE, not a search engine vs. a theme park.
d) The Disney spelling is Hakuna Matata.
e) The tradmark is Class 25 (See: Your own link) which means it's for clothing.

So no, to answer your question, they're not.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A6DVMXD4KSF9G /102-7175061-2532123
Raymond M. Simms
(Washington DC, USA)
Nickname: raymondsimms
Shipping Address: Raymond Simms - Alexandria, VA

Sorry Raymond. E-mail address + Amazon = Wish List.
You can try it out for yourself: http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/search.html/?typ e=wishlist

What's the moral of the story?
Don't use your regular e-address when posting to slashdot.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A6DVMXD4KSF9G /102-7175061-2532123
Raymond M. Simms
(Washington DC, USA)
Nickname: raymondsimms
Shipping Address: Raymond Simms - Alexandria, VA

Sorry Raymond. E-mail address + Amazon = Wish List.
You can try it out for yourself: http://www.amazon.com/gp/registry/search.html/?typ e=wishlist

What's the moral of the story?
Don't use your regular e-address when posting to slashdot.

The book goes into the Y-chromosome and mitochondrial DNA histories that track the three major migrations in and out of Africa. How most major migrations result in intermingling with the new neighbors (not extermination). How you typically trace your lineage back to a set of a common set of ancestors, but not all ancestors contribute equally (indeed their DNA contributions can genetically get pushed out even if they are your ancestors). How long chains of DNA in humans are an exact copy of the early form of life on Earth, and so on.

Good way to learn about DNA/genetics/evolution too.

There's a little bit about the history of memorizing in the article, and if you're looking for more on the topic, Frances Yates' The Art of Memory covers memorization from its mythical beginnings with Simonides, through its use by Roman orators, and ultimately its transformation into a mystical technique and occult science in the Middle Ages. Most of the techniques described in the article were practiced by the Romans.

My favorite memory Grandmaster is George Koltanowski. He held the record for the most simultaneous blindfold chess games played, and he gave demonstrations of his exceptional memory using the knight's tour. As this article describes, his audience would provide 64 words or numbers which would be written on a giant chess board on stage. Koltanowski would quickly memorize the board, and, while blindfolded, recall the data in the order of a knight's tour.

My book, Flickr Hacks, contains a number of examples of using ImageMagick (via the Perl API) with Flickr. This is one area where it really shines. I used ImageMagick to create these mosaic posters, the Flickr Colr Pickr and other cool things.

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

I love how religious threads like this are populated by people who think they have universal knowledge (I deal with computers, so therefore, I know all about other religions because they read a webpage somewhere. As evidence above. A tremendously good apologetic for Paul's take on Jesus' teaching is 'What Saint Paul really said' by N.T. Wright, a british theologian, http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0802844456/sr=8-1 0/qid=1142270602/ref=pd_bbs_10/103-6213093-7503824 ?_encoding=UTF8available at Amazon. Basically, Paul was the right guy at the right time; he was a Jewish elder who because of his extensive knowledge of the old testament extrapolated Jesus' teaching to tie in the Jewish religion and effectively show Jesus as the Messiah and fulfillment of the Jewish tradition.

And you've touched on the *really* interesting part of all of this... why is it that Europeans (straight, white, Christian withstanding) came to dominate all of these other groups and cultures. What about them was it that led to them becoming the "master race" that you refer to. Why was it not the East Indians that came to and conquered Britain and established trading posts in North America? I'm suggesting some sort of jacked up Aryan white suppremicist view, but asking a real question.

If these kinds of questions fascinate you, I suggest Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies by Jared Diamond. It realy dives into some of these issues. Good read. Oh and that link is not to some lame amazon store of mine.

Islam started with Mohammed, who lived in the late 500's (date uncertain, evidently even to Mohammed, who was an orphan, though 545 is the "official" date) and died in 632. I'm not expert on Islamic history, but I'm reading an excellent book entitled "No god but God" by Reza Aslan. It's a very approachable look at the history (that's as far as I've gotten) of Islam and the culture of the Arabic world around Mohammed's time.

We have done a good job (IMHO) of keeping our nuclear power plants relatively safe, but that's mainly because the kid down the street can't build a nuclear power plant. But he can build a robot.

And imagine the robot you could build now with the resources of a rogue state. Or even a "good" state worried about it's security. Now imagine what they'll be able to build in 20 years. I could easily imagine Taiwan thinking that a deployable, independant (not remotely controlled) infantry killing robot might make a lot of sense for them in a conflict with China. And Taiwan's clearly got the ability to build state of the art stuff.

I'm not a Luddite, I'm not even saying don't make killer robots. I'm just saying that just as the guys working on The Manhatten Project were incredibly careful -- In fact alot of their genius is in the fact they did NOT accidentally blow themselves up. Programmers working on the next generation devices need to realize that there is a very credible threat that mankind could build a machine that could malfunction and kill millions.

There is no doubt in my mind that within 20 years, the U.S. Military will deploy robots with the ability to kill in places that infantry used to go. Robots would seem very likely to be incredibly effective as fighter pilots as well. Given these things as inevitable, isn't it prudent to be talking NOW about what steps are going to be taken to make sure that we don't unleash a terminator? I personally don't trust governments to be good about this either -- I'd like to make sure that the programmers are at least THINKING about these issues.

In Bernard Lewis' The Muslim Discovery of Europe he discusses how the Islamic world basically ignored outside influences in the world of science and technology, deeming them insignificant works of infidels. After a couple of hundred years they found themselves far behind in the way of military technology which they once mastered.

They laid seige to Vienna with cannons before most europeans had even seen firearms, but defended themselves from machine guns with smooth bore muskets.

Its important to point out that many cultures stagnate under the pressure of religion. Especially those who shone brightly in their early days. The ancient Egyptians treated the scientific works of the old kingdom as sacrosanct and absolute truth. The written word worked against them and their science and medicine stagnated for thousands of years under the weight of their past glory.

Arab/Muslim societies produced some fantastic engineering in their day, much of which is described in the dry but quite informative A History of Engineering in Classical and Medieval Times.

For reasons that I don't understand, the Christian and Muslim worlds seem to have flip-flopped regarding the dominance of religion vs. rational thought somewhere in the past 200-500 years. Of course this is a great over-simplification, but it's worth remembering that there was a time when the Arab world was the center of learning and enlightenment in the non-eastern-Asian world (I phrase it like that b/c I don't want to flamebait the Indians or Chinese).