Domain: amazon.com
Stories and comments across the archive that link to amazon.com.
Comments · 40,271
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All 4 Intel Macs are already in top 15 on amazon
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so labels can get paid?
"But over the long term, the music industry says, Congress should find a way to regulate these new digital radio networks so labels can get paid when consumers keep copies of songs, as is the case with iTunes."
you know your business is doomed when your only option for revenue comes from legislation.
hey, music industry, how bout you put out SOME GOOD MUSIC!!!!!
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/browse/-/5174 /002-4786530-9680825
scroll down to "cool music on the horizon"
what the fuck is that?
toto?!!!?! hall and oates!!! barry manilow!!!!! ELVIS!!!!
that's what i have to look forward to? light rock of the 1980s and a guy who's been dead like 30 years!!!
hey everybody, the music industry ABSOLUTELY SUCKS!!!! -
Keyboard Modifier
Maybe this is what you're looking for?
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Re:Try a laptop!
And IBM sells a desktop version of the ThinkPad keyboard, called the UltraNav Travel. However it doesn't have standard navigaton key placement like the questioner is looking for.
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Commonly-Used Singleton AssHat Pattern...
originally outlined by Crosby, Stills Nash & Young in "Wooden Ships".
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Apple Design
No, Apple actually did design the bookshelf computer back in the 80's, and it was an ingenious design (separate processor, drive, graphics, etc modules). Read AppleDesign; it's hard to get but can be found in some libraries. Practically pornography, and will make you weep at the wonderful designs that never made it out of their design shop.
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"Probably won an award"
The book The Design of Everyday Things discusses horrible design decisions in appliances, doors, locks, gadgets, computers, and basically anything with a user interface. The book shows how the same mistakes are made over and over by each new designer, issues of user interfaces as simple as buttons and levers, which many engineers know little to nothing about.
In this book, the author repeatedly criticizes designs with the phrase "It probably won an award." He attacks design awards as being given out to aesthetically pleasing or structurally innovative designs, but without sufficient consideration and testing by people who actually have to use the device. -
Re:Who DOCUMENTS their evil backdoor?Who writes an evil backdoor, which dates back to Win3.1 days (when you didn't NEED an evil back door, and Windows had no clue what this Internet thing was about),
Didn't need on then. But need one now?
;)But anyway, before we ran NT 3.5 on networks, we ran Windows 3.1. On networks. So the point here is not whether this is a back door or not, but that there's really no way to say what this was added for, or supposed to do, unless MSFT trots out said programmer in question. And that's not bloody likely is it?
Lest we forget that Wine also proved vulnerable, and it was a clean-reimplementation of the specs!
Well, they are implementing it feature for feature
;)Seriously, the fix (before MSFT got around to it), was to patch gdi.dll so the callback doesn't work. Since this has to do with Printing (also seeprinter.c, you're not losing much functionality, just when you read the file, and it has the exploit, it won't do anything. And if you're printing something and you hit cancel, well, you aren't going to get a nice message, Windows has no way of telling the app the print failed. It's kindof a cool hack really. This is what i think: codes been thereforeever since the wee old days, callbacks anyway, so when they added this WMF standard, some smart MSFTie figured hey cool, I wonder if I could make this work kinda like a buffer overflow.
The result of the patch is that the SETABORT escape sequence is not accepted anymore.
Berkeley huh? Here's Clifford Stoll's classic book about the old days.
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No and Don't KnowI was wrong when I saw significant progress for desktop Linux, which was wishful thinking.
Ubuntu
4) Enough about Apple. Google will continue to roll out new products and services as it builds out its infrastructure for a huge push in 2007. They'll need money, of course, so I predict a supplemental stock offering timed with a 20-to-1 stock split. 2006 is a building year for Google.
I don't know on this one. By coincidence I was recently coddling, Yesh my preciousisess, my worn copy of Security Analysis: Principles and Technique by Benjamin Graham, David L. Dodd, Sidney Cottle, Charles Tatham. This is the goto book on investment fundamentals, that guy Warrant Buffy, or something like that, you know the guy who owns the Hathaway shirt company, learned the basics of investment from this book. IMHO there is no way to go about investing without first coming to terms with the knowledge contained in 'Security Analysis: Principles and Technique'. But I'm unsure as to how B. Graham would have parsed Google stocks. In 60's parlance Google would be a go-go stock and might have been shunned by Graham. Also I'm unsure as to Buffet's take on Google. Does the Berkshire Hathaway fund hole any Google stock? Maybe Google will split when the Berkshire Hathaway fund splits.
:) -
Re:why mod the parent up?
Well most talk radio is on AM radio, so FM typically doesn't help.
Anyways. I have two MP3 players, a iRiver thingy and a Nano.
I barely use the iRiver, even though it has FM radio and all those other shinies. Why? Because I never used them anyways.
On the other hand its possible to get a seperate FM/AM radio for pretty cheap:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-ur l/ref=br_ss_hs/002-2596788-4560056?platform=gurupa &url=index%3Dblended&field-keywords=portable+fm+ra dio&Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Go -
Another idea for preserving life on Earth . . .
Marshall T. Savage, a while ago, proposed a rather interesting idea for preserving life that I think would work as a great parallel project to this:
In this boldly optimistic manifesto, Savage proclaims a master plan for the human race: to spread life throughout the galaxy. To many, space exploration seems irrelevant to Earth's real problems; but humanity may in fact have no other way to secure its long-term survival. To remain confined to Earth, Savage claims, is to court extinction, possibly within a few decades. Savage (an engineer who has established the Millennial Foundation to promote space exploration) outlines his program for transferring a significant portion of humanity off-planet. The crucial first step is to colonize the ocean surface with floating cities, quadrupling the living space available to the growing population of Earth. This allows us to reverse the degradation of the environment by shifting to the thermal energy of the deep ocean as our primary power source. At the same time, spirulina algae (already on sale in health food stores) becomes a major new food crop. The hardware for these oceanic colonies is already within practical reach: Savage provides a detailed inventory of how his floating cities would work and support themselves, with copious citations of the scientific literature. Once this move is well underway, it frees up energy and resources for the next steps. Improved space vehicles make possible orbiting space colonies, then settlements on the moon. A larger step is terraforming Mars--creating an atmosphere and a water supply for our lifeless neighbor to form a human habitat. On an even longer time scale, the race can expand into the rest of the solar system: asteroids and the moons of other planets. Ultimately, artificial habitats may completely surround the sun. With the resources of an entire solar system at our command, according to Savage, humanity can at last send out emissaries to other stars. The stuff of science fiction? Of course--but rigorously built from existing science, carefully documented, and convincingly argued. Highly recommended. -
Re:Ah, nice Ad-Hominem attack in there...
"The reputation, sanity, motives, and anything else dealing with the person making the claim has nothing to do with the validity of the claim itself."
Technically what you just said is absolutely correct, but, regardless of whether it's correct to do so or not, the fact that people are taking Gibson's claim with a grain of salt is hardly suprising.
Recommended Reading -
Re:Math after school
I highly recommend Finney and Thomas' Calculus. It's very visual and easy to understand. Good luck.
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Re:Reflections on Trusting TrustNot only does this discuss a backdoor, but also a backdoor that can't be found by examining the source code.
This reminds me of the whole "rolling clear text" algorithm idea proposed in Digital Fortress. The idea was that with the rolling cleartext built in to the passkey, even if a brute force cracking program did make an attempt with the correct key, it wouldn't realize that the correct key had been found.
Very NSA, very chic, but I don't know if it is possible.
Could someone with a crypto background elaborate for those of us (including myself) who are crypto-challenged?
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Re:Pfft! Why do Bees fly?
So in a way, philosophy is what religion aims to be in its purest & truest form.
I disagree. Philosophy may provide you with the intellectual structure, but for most people religion is about more than that: they want a community of spiritual practice, or at least spiritual practices. The Philosopher's Song is undeniably fun, but it's very far from a hymn. And maybe your philosophy classes were more lively than mine, but I just don't see most philosophy books giving how-to info on meditative techniques, or ecstatic dance, or peyote rituals.
I know plenty of people who are functional atheists (some of them actual; some of them deists; some of them "are, like, totally into the universe, man") that even though they aren't religious still seek out some of the things we commonly associate with religion. I think that's because they fill real human needs for some people in a way that philosophy never will.
For more info on this, Huston Smith is a great author to check out. I'd recommend The World's Religions and Cleansing the Doors of Perception. -
Re:Pfft! Why do Bees fly?
So in a way, philosophy is what religion aims to be in its purest & truest form.
I disagree. Philosophy may provide you with the intellectual structure, but for most people religion is about more than that: they want a community of spiritual practice, or at least spiritual practices. The Philosopher's Song is undeniably fun, but it's very far from a hymn. And maybe your philosophy classes were more lively than mine, but I just don't see most philosophy books giving how-to info on meditative techniques, or ecstatic dance, or peyote rituals.
I know plenty of people who are functional atheists (some of them actual; some of them deists; some of them "are, like, totally into the universe, man") that even though they aren't religious still seek out some of the things we commonly associate with religion. I think that's because they fill real human needs for some people in a way that philosophy never will.
For more info on this, Huston Smith is a great author to check out. I'd recommend The World's Religions and Cleansing the Doors of Perception. -
Save $8.50!
Save yourself $8.50 by buying the book here: Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise, and Energy in the Human Settlement of Space. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!
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Save $8.50!
Save yourself $8.50 by buying the book here: Return to the Moon: Exploration, Enterprise, and Energy in the Human Settlement of Space. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!
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Re:Statistics are essential
Another good one for required reading would be "Innumeracy" by John Allen Paulos. It does well illustrating the consequences and pitfalls of mathematical ignorance in general, not just regarding statistics.
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Re:The Pure Profession - Doesn't get it
As an undergrad math major, I thoroughly enjoyed my Mathematical Logic course, including Goedel's Theorem (as a sidenote, I recommend the professor's textbook, though it's now out-of-print I think).
But so-called "Ivory Tower" mathematicians don't get it. The statement used in Goedel's theorem is not a useful one (despite being true) - and Goedel's theorem says little about our ability to prove or not prove useful statements in mathematics. It is an interesting sidenote (one often abused by philosophers and "intellectual" opponents of mathematics), but says little about the tool-other than it is limited in some way. Is it an important way, a way that will inhibit our ability to use the tool? That's not clear based on the Goedel's results. -
Consultant: Charles StrossMaybe they'll get Charles Stross, author of The Atrocity Archives
Granted, his IT workers are slightly atypical...
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Re:AI - Where will it come from?
The answer to consciousness is neither in physics, metaphysics, nor computer science (and definitely not philosophy!), but in neurology (should be obvious, but so many forget): http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0156010755/104-8
8 05063-4954346?v=glance&n=283155 -
Nope!!
No. Unless you're referring to what the summary should have said in reference to the article. But then yI would point out that "Eggs and ham" is a unit, making "green eggs and ham" consist of both green eggs and green ham as shown on the cover illustration of the book.
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Thank God...
They can protect me from Free Radicals
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Buy it here!
You can get the game here: Dead or Alive 4. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!
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Buy it here!
You can get the game here: Dead or Alive 4. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!
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Save FIFTEEN ($15) bucks!
Save yourself $15.30 by buying the book here: Beginning Python: From Novice to Professional. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!
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Save FIFTEEN ($15) bucks!
Save yourself $15.30 by buying the book here: Beginning Python: From Novice to Professional. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!
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Re:bad luck?
If it really was a case of someone pushing the wrong button, then there is a good chance that the blame should fall on the person who designed the button, rather than the person who hit the button. Read this for more details.
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Bah! Everyone knows the best Python book is...
this one.
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Re:Totally fresh in programmingLike some have mentioned, Python is a great place to start learning. It's platform indpendent (point #1), object-oriented (point #2), and not VB or Java (points 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7.)
My hatred of Java and VB aside, however, I would add this: Once you get a good grasp of how to program in Python, it would be time to cut your teeth on a lower-level language. C or C++ would work here. It's going to be a little rough, as you get used to the different requirements, but you'll learn a lot more about Comp Sci.
Also, and this could possibly go before you learned C or C++, you may wish to take a look at design patterns once you get the basics down. Addison Wesley has an excellent book on patterns here (No, there is no referer BS in the link) which I encourage you to look at.
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Re:Beginner, no programing experince!
When I was at borders yesterday I saw a book, I think it was from thompson that was for complete beginners with no previous programming experience. Lemme check to see if I can find a link... yes I found it, here's a link
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Wait! You mean...
...there is a company who tracks data about what you buy, and uses it to make recommendations on other things you might like? Holy Sh*t!!
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Wait! You mean...
...there is a company who tracks data about what you buy, and uses it to make recommendations on other things you might like? Holy Sh*t!!
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Unless you are a Heechee.
Spoiler warning: If you are a Heechee then black holes make great hiding places. You could take your spaceship in and out as well as rescue your girlfriend trapped in the event horizon. -- IV
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Re:Why this is important
I have read it. Behe starts with an interesting idea, and brings out an impressive array of research, but his arguments don't stand up very well to careful logic.
For a pretty thorough drubbing of Behe's flawed premise, see Tower of Babel: The Evidence Against the New Creationism by Robert T. Pennock.
Got any other suggestions? -
right....Let's look at logic here. I think this is the correct statement being said here:
If bees don't fly, then intelligent design is not true.
Umm... that doesn't exactly make sense. It also seems that not many ever think about a big reason why intelligent design is a very acceptable theory: irreducible complexity. I believe that a book was written on this and other reasons (biochemical reasons) for a disbelief in evolution, entitled Darwin's Black Box. A link for the book on Amazon can be found here. Perhaps, this will open some minds here to the fact that intelligent design is a very legitamate argument. I don't think many people here really consider the bee thing to be much of a problem for intelligent design, anyway. It is obviously not true to say that intelligent design is false because we are understanding more and more things about the universe. Even if we knew everything about the universe (which is, of course, in defiance of philosphy), it does not neccesarily mean that God would not exist. That could be one of those discoveries. I hope some people will take the time to read Darwin's Black Box and several of the other books that are listed as "others were also interested in:" to realize, at the very least, that intelligent design is a very legitamate theory that is not as easily squashed as so many here seem to believe.
(-hrair-)
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Re:Why this is important
Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth, Volume II http://www.icr.org/store/index.php?main_page=pubs
_ product_book_info&products_id=2655
Creation's Tiny Mystery by Robert V. Gentry http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0961675330/qid=11 36933189/104-3539345-2578349
Bones Of Contention: A Creationist Assessment Of Human Fossils by Marvin L. Lubenow http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801065232/qid=11 36933445/104-3539345-2578349
Evolution on Trial by Dr. Thomas Kindell http://kindell.nwcreation.net/biography.htm (don't reading the excerpt; not representative)
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Re:Why this is important
Radioisotopes and the Age of the Earth, Volume II http://www.icr.org/store/index.php?main_page=pubs
_ product_book_info&products_id=2655
Creation's Tiny Mystery by Robert V. Gentry http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0961675330/qid=11 36933189/104-3539345-2578349
Bones Of Contention: A Creationist Assessment Of Human Fossils by Marvin L. Lubenow http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0801065232/qid=11 36933445/104-3539345-2578349
Evolution on Trial by Dr. Thomas Kindell http://kindell.nwcreation.net/biography.htm (don't reading the excerpt; not representative)
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Re:Newton's Second Law of Thermodynamics
Granville Sewell, a mathematics professor who certainly understands the laws of thermodynamics, refutes this oft-heard argument in a recent article and in his new DiffEq textbook.
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Re:Quality of Archival CDs
The 100 year archival quality CD's were only the pressed CD-ROMs made with high quality dies... not the mass procuced CDs that AOL ships out and especially not CD-Rs.
I have definitely seen 100 year claims on CDR "archival" media. As have other people as is evident in the comments here under this story. Now I am not claiming that they can actually do it, I am just stating the claims of some manufacturers.
The real question would be who is marketing and specing CD-R manufacturing for archival quality CDs and have specs guarenteeing that they will last 10+ years without failing? There must be somebody out there doing that, but I don't know of them myself.
Here are the claims:
Delkin CDR 300 years!
Delkin DVDR 100 years.
TDK CDR 100 years.
Memorex CDR 100 years.
Claims of Fuji CDR 70-100 years and Kodak 100-200 years!
Some brand I've never heard of with 100 year CDR's but 1 year warrantee. ; )
Verbatim CDR 100 years.
Etc, etc, etc.
Someone else posted here that some company provides a 100 year warrantee and I have also seen that TDK once made such a ridiculous offer too.
Whatever the deal is, it is certainly WELL over the 5 year maximum that "expert" claims. -
Re:digg yourself
We've got meta moderation, why not story moderation? Why not have the concept of Poster Karma?
The book Emergence has a chapter on Slashdot and discusses this. -
Congrats, and buy it here too!
Congratulations to Robin! BTW, you can also buy the book at Amazon. Check out the awesome reviews the book is getting already: Point & Click OpenOffice.org .
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Re:Oldest trick in the book
Q. WHY is everything about Iraq?
A. Not everything is about Iraq.
Q. And what is the conspiracy there?
A. To divert U.S. taxpayer dollars into the military industrial complex, and secure oil supplies and contracts for the likes of Haliburton.
Q.Oh I know what you'll say... "O!L!!!! Bu$h is getting rich off oil!!! That's why he has become the most hated person in the world so he can have money and power!!!"
A. Not really. It's the puppeteers that gain.
Q. Too bad most people that hate the current person in office don't think of a few simple facts:
(1) He was already rich.
(2) If he really wanted power he would be doing things EVERYONE liked... or at least not pissing off the world (i.e. any past liberal president).
A. We don't hate him, just think he's a gimp.
Q. Maybe, just maybe, the actual conspiracy is that, although unpopular, we are in Iraq to help the Iraq people. That may not be why we went there in the first place, but that is why we are there now. No conspiracy... move along.
A. Unlikely. If we were there to help, we wouldn't have massacred 100,000 civilians and built up resentment for the future.
Q. *sigh*
A. *sigh*
Q. Wow that was offtopic...
A. Not really.
Read "Class Warfare" (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1567510922), and realise that this event (Iraq) had been planned for more than a decade.
Wakey wakey! Hello CIA, FBI, MI5, MI6. keywords: Bush, Blair, Berlusconi, muppet, puppet, stoppit. -
Re:Nature's Black Box?
I feel this is rather obligatory, but... Have you ever read Passage by Connie Willis? The whole boks is about near death experiences and what the images seen really mean. Okay, it's fiction but it's interesting fiction, and it makes you think....
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Re:So what?
I like Brak's version better. (.wma)
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Re:This will save my wrists!
Unfortunately with most ebook sellers pricing themselves higher than equivalent paperbacks
For the majority of cases this isn't true. I buy from two stores, Ereader because I like their format and find their DRM non-intrusive nor limiting.
The other store which will appeal to slashdotters is Fictionwise. Both stores sell books for a comparable price to Amazon. such as The Footprints of God which is cheaper at Ereader. Another example is Blindfold for $8 from Fictionwise or second hand at Amazon. I know which I'd prefer ;)
Having said that, you won't save much money, if anything, buying e-books (I've found Australians will actually save some money though, because our prices are dearer, even once you take exchange rate into account). I still prefer the e-books because I'm running out of room in my house for dead tree books. I'm leaving the rest of the room to comic book collections and books not available electronically (although more and more books are being made available, such as Anne McCaffrey's books).
Having said that, inertia does appear to sometimes cause e-books to be priced dearer for a while longer then the paperbacks. An example is Robert J Sawyer's Hybrids which was kept at the hardcover price for a while after the paperback was released. But it has now finally come down in price. So if you're patient, you will get good prices for your e-books. -
Re:This will save my wrists!
Unfortunately with most ebook sellers pricing themselves higher than equivalent paperbacks
For the majority of cases this isn't true. I buy from two stores, Ereader because I like their format and find their DRM non-intrusive nor limiting.
The other store which will appeal to slashdotters is Fictionwise. Both stores sell books for a comparable price to Amazon. such as The Footprints of God which is cheaper at Ereader. Another example is Blindfold for $8 from Fictionwise or second hand at Amazon. I know which I'd prefer ;)
Having said that, you won't save much money, if anything, buying e-books (I've found Australians will actually save some money though, because our prices are dearer, even once you take exchange rate into account). I still prefer the e-books because I'm running out of room in my house for dead tree books. I'm leaving the rest of the room to comic book collections and books not available electronically (although more and more books are being made available, such as Anne McCaffrey's books).
Having said that, inertia does appear to sometimes cause e-books to be priced dearer for a while longer then the paperbacks. An example is Robert J Sawyer's Hybrids which was kept at the hardcover price for a while after the paperback was released. But it has now finally come down in price. So if you're patient, you will get good prices for your e-books. -
How to teach kids to read
1. Bedtime stories
2. Synthetic phonics
3. Visit the library, buy them their favourite books as presents
4. Upgrade to meta-reading using this.
At no point in the above does a computer feature as anything other than a source of readables. -
Basic eLearning 101
Dr. Richard Mayer has done extensive research on the effect of offtopic multimedia thrown in to eLearning projects(cognitive overload).
He wrote a great introductory book (with Ruth Colvin ClarK) on how to use multimedia to improve student learning, rather than hinder it.
For a good look at an online course done pretty much right (at least based on current, peer reviewed research) see the WCLN's Flow course on water resource use & river management (click the login as guest button).
And see the adaptation notes for the discussion of the research backing the course design.
Multimedia can result in great improvements in student learning, or it can severly impair learning, depending on how it is used & thanks to folks like Dr. Mayer there is good solid research that can be used for effective instructional design.