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I got an iHome (iSigh) for my iPod. It isn't big but the sound is fine for the bedroom. The best part is that it is an alarm clock that will use your ipod as the music source (also has AM/FM radio and beeper). One thing -- it's the easiest digital alarm clock to set -- it has a round spinning wheel to set the time and works forward or backward.

I forgot to meniton the book Linux Multimedia Hacks. In chapter 4 it mentions building a Digital Video Recorder (DVR). I have a copy of the book but haven't read it yet.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation(EFF) also has a page about building your own PVR for HDTV. I don't know if you are iterested in recording HDTV with a PVR but, if so, pcHDTV is one of the two only companies that makes a Linux HDTV video capture card. But, I am not sure if an HDTV video capture card is actually something you would want or not.

KSR, Author of the ever-popular Red, Green, Blue Mars trilogy of novels as well as a host of other extra- and neo-terrestrial adventures had a good one in his novella collection Icehenge http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0312866097/qid=11 41145898/sr=1-27/ref=sr_1_27/104-7802270-0079101?s =books&v=glance&n=283155

I believe it's in this one that one of the side stories is about a "space golf" tournament in an astroid field that involves lobbing a small clump of rocket propelled debris at a "hole" astroid and using gravity of others to bend the path of the ball. In a humours take, the whole event is VERY dull, anti-climatic and ends in a draw for lack of time/recalculation by both "participants".

Almost like the original sport is without debauchery... 8^)

priceless,
l8r,
Levendis47

I can't believe that I had to read this far down the discussion to find someone willing to call out the fact that the emperor has no clothes! I tried reading the sample pages, and my head started to hurt! This is, plain and simple, a badly-written book! I don't care if it was plagiarized. I don't care if it's full of heresy. It just didn't deserve to get published. Random House should be sued for crimes against good taste.

It's nice to have a free tutorial, but Amazon reports that O'Reilly is releasing something called Ruby on Rails: Up and Running in May. This will be good for those among us who have become addicted to O'Reilly's efficient guides.

> When was the last time you saw a list of citations in a work of fiction

This work of fiction:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1401905013/103-75 24192-8012635?v=glance&n=283155

Don't forget that design patterns started in architecture. I'd grant that most of the books you refer to are chasing buzzwords, but some of them may be trying to create new pattern languages that apply to a different arena of concerns.

I suspect that anything requiring non-trivial design skills could have a pattern language built around it. Whether that would generally be a good thing for each respective field or not is a little less clear to me; from a programming standpoint they seem to be an "ok" but not "fantastic" method for learning new techniques.

If you use DVD-Shrink at maximum compression, reauthor to remove most of the alternate languages, menu chrome, and other bonus features, you can sometimes squeeze a regular release DVD down to a single 1.4GB 80mm DVD-R. Sometimes not, if the movie runs a little long, but OTOH it's usually quite practical if you're only taking a single TV episode from a collection that puts several on each retail disk.

Of course, one could use a different codec besides VOB/MPEG2... but that loses compatibility with many non-computer DVD players. And, of course, many codecs are covered by patents, which adds to the costs if you want to make a retail product, and there are definite trade offs with the video quality. But if the whole problem was easy, someone would have solved it by now.

Another worthwhile fiction proposing an alternate view of Christ's life is the Nobel-prize recipient Jose Saramago's The Gospel According to Jesus Christ. (His novel 'Blindness' is most intriguing.. Stephen-King-ish plotline but with time and care put into it's writing).

As important as the actual work is, I still suggest first visiting a work location if possible.

Next locate an AM/FM radio (if you don't have a rental car). Then make sure the site has
less than 10 country-western stations but more than two.

You get a decent balance between urban/rural and North/South ... you avoid hellholes ...
and it's at least as accurate as Places Rated Almanac

If you want to read a really good grail conspiracy theory, read Foucalt's Pendulum
I think Name of the Rose is another, I didn't read it. Eco's a very thick writer, with plenty of big words. Great sense of humor as well, I really enjoyed Pendulum.

It isn't real, it never happened!

But, I've been keeping that journal as proof that these events are real. I know they are; they... have to be!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0596005164/qid=11 40868624/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/103-7332469-2586209?s=b ooks&v=glance&n=283155

You can buy the game here: Full Auto for the low low price of $54.99. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

You can buy the game here: Full Auto for the low low price of $54.99. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Amazon has it for $32.97 new, 22.89 new
vs $44.95 from BN

Save yourself $16.98 by buying the book here: Patterns in Game Design. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

1994: The computer scientist and game programmer Andre LaMothe writes the quintessential book on game programming, "Tricks of the Game Programming Gurus". The book is dense with useful information, humor, and actual theory on game programming. Millions of Game Players are transformed into real-world Game Programmers overnight.

2004: Staffan Bjork & Jussi Holopainen attempt to bring all the wonder and excitement of development patterns from the business world into the Game Programming world by releasing an utterly boring book full of confusing terminology. (2.5 stars on Amazon.) Programmers everywhere are unimpressed, and budding game makers are left confused. The bright side is that the book explains what an Avatar and High Score List are.

My, my, my. How far we have progressed. :-(

It isn't real, it never happened!

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00005JLTK

Hmm. Just like Rasen: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0009X765K

would be kind of interesting - a virus that turns the computer on & off at odd times, and opens and closes the cup holder^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HCD drawer.

"We don't need virus protection - we need an exorcist!"

init 0

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00005JLTK

Hmm. Just like Rasen: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0009X765K

would be kind of interesting - a virus that turns the computer on & off at odd times, and opens and closes the cup holder^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HCD drawer.

"We don't need virus protection - we need an exorcist!"

init 0

Anybody read Michal Marshall Smith's Only Forward?

Here you have both industrial strength and living room versions of devices to bend gravity, called GravaBendars (TM). Those for the home runs on batteries.

From the book: "Now, you haven't seen a messed up room, until you've been in one where the GravaBenda (TM) has failed twice, in opposite directions.

too lazy to login but heres a tip

you can actually cut that link down quite a bit and remove all information about how you got to that page:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/006073132X/

stop amazon tracking - trim your links

The problem with Larry Niven's vision of the future is that alloplasty ("gadgets instead of organs") in the Known Space universe didn't get invented until like 2400, see A Gift from Earth (now part of the Three Books of Known Space omnibus). That's really, really far in the future. With the current pace of technology, artificial organs will be on the market in mere decades. Heck, Ray Kurzweil doesn't even think most of us will have biological bodies two hundred years from now.

Also, the division into "expert programmer" and "regular programmer" is silly.
No it is not. There are average programmers out there. They can hang pretty good. They can generally grasp what is going on. But they do not do the cutting edge work. They crank average code out for average things.

Now your 'expert' is the sort of guy out there that lives and breaths it. They like to know that instruction xyz takes 3.9 cycles on average to finish. They live on this sort of thing. They are truely spooky to watch. They just zone and whatever they do comes out awsome. These people are extreemly rare. They are usually semi difficult to work with too as they do not think like everyone else.

That's not because people are too stupid to do this sort of thing
Now there I really disagree. There are truely stupid people out there that program. They should not be near a keyboard at all. They are mearly in it for the money, or presteege. They usually do not take the time to learn a system. They whip things out and just let the cards fall where they may. If they bother to comment code you will see things like 'not sure why this work but it does' or 'just incase not sure why' or 'someone else told me to do this'. Then you as an average programmer comes by and goes what the hell were they thinking?!

Also this compiler may just be an enabler to get *AT* the features of a CPU. You do need a compiler capable of exploiting things. Will it have some sort of wizzy thing to auto thread things? Maybe, maybe not... If I didnt have a compiler that could let me at the other 'cells' in the Cell processor I would be rather mad at the people who make the compiler. Wouldnt you?

But like *MOST* programs the best thinking is not done by the compiler but by the grey stuff holding your ears apart. The compiler is mearly the tool to get things done. It is not the thing that does the work for you. 99% of things out there need 0 optimization. It is that 1% where you will need it the most. The most optimal code in existance is the code that never runs. It uses 0 cycles. Real optimization comes in where you time the code then decide what needs to change to make something go faster. If you just 'hope' everything will be optimized by the compiler you will always have slow code. You will also never understand why. You are just 'guessing' the compiler is crap. And like most guesses when dealing with computers, you are wrong.

I highly recommend the book debugging It shows many of the common errors people make when trying to make a system and diagnose one. And it is a fairly easy read to boot.

How is that fair? Bill Gates deserves to have more of his income confiscated because... Really I want to know. How is taking more money from someone just because they have it fair? On the flip side, how do you justify giving government benefits to someone who has not contributed? In 2003 the top 5% of income earners paid 54.36% of the income taxes. The top 10% paid 65.84%. The top 50% paid 96.54%. That means the bottom 50% of income earners paid a whopping 3.46% of all income taxes. The only way this would be fair is if you vote's weight was directly proportional to the amount of taxes you paid.

Your not looking for a fair tax system, your looking for a way to feel good by kicking the rich in the beanbags. Go read The Fair Tax Book by Neal Boortz before you start ripping the Fair Tax as unfair gifts to the wealthy. It's an short (208 Pages) and easy read for small minded people like yourself. And take solace in the fact that Neal will have to pay confiscatory taxes on the money he makes on you.

Screwed Time Machine? Check

Have you seen the 1960 Time Machine? All the news I could find about the latest production made it sound like any other movie with big whiz bang explosions.

The director Simon Wells was replaced at some point with Gore Verbinski.
Thus earning the film such reviews as this and this, and this and this..

I think it is wonderful when a movie doesn't ruin the books story. The 1960 Time Machine of the did just that.

The Time Machine of 2002 did not. H. G. Wells spun in his grave

    Later lifeforms had been smaller, brighter. Some, like the Wheelers, had been evolutionary dead ends. Some, notably the Great Spindle Kings and the shameleons, had been successful in the only way that evolution measured success - they survived longer. But even star-striding races died. The universe was tombs upon graves upon mausoleums. The comet that brightened the pagan skies was the abraded corpse of a scientist, three eons ago.
    The Policy of the Company was simple. It was: make Man immortal.
    It would take a while, and had only just started. But if Man could be spread thinly on many different planets, so that he became many types of Man, perhaps he would survive. The Spindles had died because they were so alike. Now, upon dozens of worlds, men were being changed by different forces, maddened by different moons, bent by different gravities.
    Since the universe could not be said to have a natural ending, because the universe was not natural but only the sum of the lives that had shaped it, Men intended to live for ever. Why not ?

I finally remembered one of the great books I had read about this topic:

Into the Buzzsaw
by Kristina Borjesson

Don't deny yourself. Go and get it from your library immediately. :^)

If you want to read about some really radical ideas about what omnipresent information will do, try Golden Age by John C Wright instead. In the society described there, everyone actually lives in a state called "surface dreaming", where reality and data about it are seamlessly melded so that you can "format" what you see in any way you want, just as you can use a user-stylesheet to custom-render a web page today. (Obviously, these "sense-filters" cause their own share of problems, which the book discusses in depth) There is also another information "channel', called "middle-dreaming" that can be overlayed over that, which contains metadata about what you see. By looking into middle-dreaming you could search an object's history, description, or function. Combine this with mind-reading ("noetic technology"), superfast sentient computers ("sophotechs") to help you communicate, search for, and do things in a fraction of a second, ubiqutous nanotech, and many many other out-of-this world ideas, and it becomes easy to see why you'll love this book.

Of course, that was before George Bush was elected. So there's nothing to worry about.

Save yourself $1.20 by buying the book here: Inescapable Data : Harnessing the Power of Convergence. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

In 5 years, it's possible that making everything parallel will be a basic principle just like making modular code.

I've been tasked with re-writing this document so that it describes Java concurrency in terms of JSR 166 instead of the more primitive thread management currently described. It only took a little research to convince me that I'll not be able to do more than scratch the surface. It's a huge topic. What I plan to do is guide the reader to a simple use case involving caching in a ConcurrentHashMap. (I still haven't figured out what to cache: it has to be resource-intensive enough to make the example realistic, but not too complicated. Ideas, anyone?) Then I'll point people to several thick, dense books such as this one, this one, and this one. After which they're on their own.

In 5 years, it's possible that making everything parallel will be a basic principle just like making modular code.

I've been tasked with re-writing this document so that it describes Java concurrency in terms of JSR 166 instead of the more primitive thread management currently described. It only took a little research to convince me that I'll not be able to do more than scratch the surface. It's a huge topic. What I plan to do is guide the reader to a simple use case involving caching in a ConcurrentHashMap. (I still haven't figured out what to cache: it has to be resource-intensive enough to make the example realistic, but not too complicated. Ideas, anyone?) Then I'll point people to several thick, dense books such as this one, this one, and this one. After which they're on their own.

In 5 years, it's possible that making everything parallel will be a basic principle just like making modular code.

I've been tasked with re-writing this document so that it describes Java concurrency in terms of JSR 166 instead of the more primitive thread management currently described. It only took a little research to convince me that I'll not be able to do more than scratch the surface. It's a huge topic. What I plan to do is guide the reader to a simple use case involving caching in a ConcurrentHashMap. (I still haven't figured out what to cache: it has to be resource-intensive enough to make the example realistic, but not too complicated. Ideas, anyone?) Then I'll point people to several thick, dense books such as this one, this one, and this one. After which they're on their own.

Raymond Wurzveil has been writing for years now on the coming merger of man and machine (as in his highly recommended book The Age of Spiritual Machines ). The general idea is that eventually our minds will be transferrable to silicon and external means of storage, but this idea of humans being augmented with biological computing is an interesting short-term solution. I wonder if he'll make some comment about it.

...the other 30% of the ocean consists of shark? That's a lot of damned shark!

Ah Statistics.

-FL

-FL

For more ways of bending the truth, check out Darrell Huff's How to Lie With Statistics.

As a side note. Apple I Replica Creation is an interesting book about building an Apple I from the chips up.

Ever since I read Linzmayer's Apple Confidential , I've felt a little sorry for Steve Wozniak. Here's a man who was used by Steve Jobs to launch a brand and didn't even get justly compensated, and then he essentially gets forced out of his own company in a way much worse than Jobs' infamous departure.

But then I realized that, in spite of his lesser success and his challenges, Woz is probably a much happier man. Anyone who gives as much as he does to charity and cares as much about having disadvantaged kids must have a lot of inner peace.

There's a neat book by a guy named Michael Talbot called The Holographic Universe that talks about this idea quite a bit. He often cites David Bohm, and if you want to get into Bohm's thoughts on the potentially holographic nature of the universe and how that relates to us through quantum effects, you should read Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Bohm is/has been a leading researcher in the field of Quantum Physics.

In short form: Talbot's assertion is that some part of our brain operates like a hologram, with diffraction patterns caused by quantum fluctuations basically defining us, whether you are talking about thought or memory. Further, both Talbot and Bohm suggest that the holographic nature of our brain provides us a means to tap into a deeper holographic reality, which they both claim explains experiences with the "paranormal".

The counterargument is that quantum effects are not significant enough to affect, say, the firing of a neuron one way or another. I find this to be an extremely specious argument (but keep in mind, IANAQuantumPhysicist) since everything is connected, and the way we picture matter (in terms of being built of entirely divisible, discrete atoms) is really not very accurate. It's very newtonian - you push on this atom, and it pushes on that atom, but since we know that atoms don't actually touch each other, and there is a propagation effect involved... Well, let's just say it's hard for us to make concrete statements about things we don't really understand. And besides, physicists I know don't hold that opinion. It always makes me feel better when people smarter than I am hold similar views...

There's a neat book by a guy named Michael Talbot called The Holographic Universe that talks about this idea quite a bit. He often cites David Bohm, and if you want to get into Bohm's thoughts on the potentially holographic nature of the universe and how that relates to us through quantum effects, you should read Bohm's Wholeness and the Implicate Order. Bohm is/has been a leading researcher in the field of Quantum Physics.

In short form: Talbot's assertion is that some part of our brain operates like a hologram, with diffraction patterns caused by quantum fluctuations basically defining us, whether you are talking about thought or memory. Further, both Talbot and Bohm suggest that the holographic nature of our brain provides us a means to tap into a deeper holographic reality, which they both claim explains experiences with the "paranormal".

The counterargument is that quantum effects are not significant enough to affect, say, the firing of a neuron one way or another. I find this to be an extremely specious argument (but keep in mind, IANAQuantumPhysicist) since everything is connected, and the way we picture matter (in terms of being built of entirely divisible, discrete atoms) is really not very accurate. It's very newtonian - you push on this atom, and it pushes on that atom, but since we know that atoms don't actually touch each other, and there is a propagation effect involved... Well, let's just say it's hard for us to make concrete statements about things we don't really understand. And besides, physicists I know don't hold that opinion. It always makes me feel better when people smarter than I am hold similar views...

This might be a valuable invention for very non-technical users, but there are already plenty of solutions out there for creating web content easily. Most weblogging systems already allow the user to create permanent pages outside of a weblogging structure, see Douglass, Little, & Smith's Building Online Communities With Drupal, phpBB, and WordPress . If you can use Wordpress to make a huge e-commerce site, Grandma can certainly use it to put up a static but re-editable set of photos (once grandson has installed the backend). Google is definitely repeating past accomplishments here.

Yeah, 'cause it's been a while since the Stamp Act, the Tea Act, and the Quartering Act.

The British are no strangers to shafting. Just ask the Irish. Or the Indians (from India).

He does have credentials, I'll give you that. However, even though he's not a lawyer, he most definitely is out on an anti-video-game crusade. And on mostly making observations, and not judgements, how about referencing one of his other books, Stop Teaching Our Kids to Kill: A Call to Action Against TV, Movie, and Video Game Violence ?

He does have evidence to back up his arguments, and, like I mentioned in my original post, I don't dismiss the evidence, nor do I even outright dismiss his conclusions. I do think that the arguments are weak though. For example, he takes the argument that video games will teach how to shoot a gun (which I will take to be true) to the conclusion that kids with this knowledge will go out and kill people. He mentions how a kid who had never fired a gun before stole a gun from his neighbor's house, went to his school, and killed his classmates with very good shooting accuracy. He goes on to claim video games gave him this ability. Well, I know people who actually have experience with firearms, and I know that they could shoot and kill me easily. I'm not afraid that they will, though. We need to pay attention to what made that kid want to kill his classmates, not whether or not he was good at it. If he had missed everyone of those shots, it would still be highly disturbing that he tried to kill them. Basically, I don't think the skill to kill someone has anything to do with the willingness to do so, and he hasn't provided evidence to back that up, unless it's in a battlefield situation where mortal danger is involved.

He also neglects to talk about the evidence that goes against his arguments. TV, Movies, and Video Games have been getting more violent, but youth violence itself has decreased. You don't see me claiming that the increase in media violence is the reason for this decrease, but you'd expect that if it were responsible for making children more violent, these crimes would have skyrocketed in the past two decades.

I didn't mean to attack your views personally. I don't claim to know whether or not violence in the media and video games are detrimental or not to children. They could very well be. Dave Grossman, however, doesn't get credibility from me because he's a bit too sure, he doesn't give himself or his studies the healthy scientific doubt. He's a professor of psychology, and those are good credentials, but he's not acting like a research professional. He's acting like someone who wants to sell books to the masses.

These developments will bring file security to many non-technical users, but for the nerds out there there have already been practical solutions for some time.

I've been keeping the hard disk of my Linux encrypted with twofish for over three years now (see the description of this encryption method in Bruce Schneier's magisterial Applied Cryptography ). Swap is encrypted with a random key generated on each boot-up. At first I used the old cryptoloop method, but as soon as the kernel support was there I switched to the crypto device-mapper target. I never noticed any performance penalties: this is a very efficient solution.

These guys?

1. Earn a heck of a lot of money.
2. Set up a charitable foundation.
3. ???????????
4. World peace and mutual understanding! (And, um, some profit for the execs).