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It looks just like a car heater.

Like so:

http://images.amazon.com/images/P/B0000V0AKE.16._A A260_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg

Porter Cable's wireless router would work great, but to the best of my knowledge, it doesn't run Linux.

USB charging ports on cell phones is my favorite "gadget" for the past year. I'm not sure if they existed in 2004, but I have 3 different phones in my household that use USB charging ports

They've existed for a few years now. Maybe in 2006 you'll discover the Wall->Usb adapter, and possibly even the CAR->USB power adapter. So you can use all those mobile gadgets when you're, you know, mobile.

USB charging ports on cell phones is my favorite "gadget" for the past year. I'm not sure if they existed in 2004, but I have 3 different phones in my household that use USB charging ports

They've existed for a few years now. Maybe in 2006 you'll discover the Wall->Usb adapter, and possibly even the CAR->USB power adapter. So you can use all those mobile gadgets when you're, you know, mobile.

Save yourself about $3 by buying the book here: Makers. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Save yourself about $3 by buying the book here: Makers. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Here is the end game of all patent protection laws -- making the attorneys wealthy. Patents are a government granted monopoly. All government granted monopolies take advantage of their power over time -- and the big winners are the lawyers, of course. Do you expect another result? Do you expect patents to make people innovate? We've been human for thousands of years, we've innovated for thousands of years. New products hit the market every day that were designed by some mom or some kid in a garage -- they didn't think of patents when they started designing.

Patents are not inherently bad. Yes, they can be abused, BUT they are an integral part of our entrepreneurial society. There is a direct correlation between countries that have strong patent protection (i.e. your [horrible] government enabled monopolies) and innovation.

I will explain. Why would a drug company invest the hundreds of million of dollars that it takes to develop a life-saving drug and push it through years of FDA hoops? The only reason they would attempt this is the very patents that you condemn. With the use of patents they can be more certain to recouple their HUGE costs. Without that patent protection, there is no incentive for them to invest the capital to find new solutions. This is the reason that America, due to its strong patent protection and low medical industry price controls is responsible for a HUGE portion of the world's innovative and life-saving drugs.

For further reading, look at " Applied Economics" by Thomas Sowell

As for your other arguments ... It is a different world than it was bad in the "Mom and Pop shop"/"Garage inventions" days. Yes, it can be done, but it is becoming the exception rather than the norm.

Your uneducated cynicism shows a depressing degree of ignorance of reality and knowledge of economics.

Why don't we dig up everything to find ALL the answers? If you outright believe anything an archeologist says you should read: Motel Of The Mysteries http://www.google.com/search?q=motel+of+the+myster ies http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0395 284252?v=glance One review: This book was actually a gift from my Mother who knows I enjoy things archaeological and historical. Since she`s more than a trifle eccentric and has a marvelous sense of the absurd, I've a sneaking suspicion she was poking a little fun at me--which is something I probably need once in a while for my own good. The Motel of the Mysteries is a wonderful send up of the fields of archaeology and history. It's aim is doubtless to entertain, at which it's vastly successful, but over and above that the book makes quite clear what archaeology legitimately can and cannot do. I think it also points out that what is taken as "The Reality" of the past is often as much a function of current cultural biases and of the personal motives of individual researchers as it is of what actually occurred in the past. (This was made quite clear to me when I saw Knossos on Crete for the first time and realized that a great deal of imagination had gone into the reconstruction of the "Minoan" buildings there). My favorite parts of Motel were Archaeologist Carson's interpretation of the hotel bathroom as the inner sanctum of a religious structure and the subsequent depiction of his assistant--ala Heinrich Schliemann with the Trojan treasure and Leonard Wooley with the Ur III treasure--wearing bathroom accoutrements as religious paraphernalia. The author also pokes fun at museums and at all of us, when he includes a collection of "Souvenirs and Quality Reproductions" available for sale at the end of the book. My favorite is the coffee set based on the "sacred urn" (toilet). Goodness knows I've purchased my fair share of quality reproductions on my travels throughout the world! This should be suggested reading for every college history and archeology major and required for those seeking degrees over BA in these fields!

The russo-alaskan bridge theory is apparently pretty shaky anyway, archeologists are convinced some South American civilizations were around before the land bridge. The book 1491 has a good summary of current knowledge.

This is the book your looking for. Microsoft Windows Internals, Fourth Edition: Microsoft Windows Server(TM) 2003, Windows XP, and Windows 2000 (Pro-Developer) (Hardcover) That and technet. I have the 3rd edition and I found it very informative.

Actually, there's a fantastic book about the Windows internals called Microsoft Windows Internals, Fourth Edition by Mark Russinovich. Every Windows programmer should have this book. Even if your work is entirely in .NET, its important to know why some of the decisions in .NET were made as they were, and its also vitally important to know exactly how Windows handles process security.

The probability to live in a universe that allows intelligent human life to exist under the condition that human life exists in the universe is exactly 1.

The inherent danger in the ID ideas is that ID proponents somehow believe that because one their claims cannot be ultimately refuted (except by God), they somehow have the authority to declare the rest of science "bullshit".

Many players would call GoldenEye 007 for Nintendo 64 the Best Movie To Game Conversion Evar(tm). It was greatly improved by the fact that the level designers took a lot of their cues from John Gardner's novelization, filling out details that were only implied in the movie. Likewise, the developers of Hulk video games could have referred to the comics.

I think I relized that point depended on a false dichtomy, and treated it accordingly.

I'll take the 'live forever option without the ant analogy' option, thanks!

PS if you take a look at John S. Lewis' work (such as Mining the Sky) it may help you get over Malthus.

ms sidewinder joystick

The following books show some of the history of the U.S. government's secret agencies, and help explain much of the underlying reasons for U.S. government violence in the Middle East. Often the secret agencies have acted for special interests and against the good of the people. For example, the CIA overthrew the democratically elected president, President Mossadegh, because he wanted his country to receive more of the profit from oil pumped from his country. The U.S. government's political interference eventually resulted in a violent revolution in Iran, and a determination by Iran to strike back.

1. Unholy Wars: Afghanistan, America, and international terrorism by John K. Cooley, 2000, Third edition, Pluto Press, London, England and Sterling, Virginia, USA. Reviews: Powell's Barnes & Noble Amazon

   Osama bin Laden is "the personification of blowback". You can read more about how the CIA created a political climate very supportive of Osama and his ideas in an article by Jane's, a very well-respected publication devoted to military issues. The article was published 3 days after the second World Trade Center bombings, on September 14, 2004: Why? An attempt to explain the unexplainable.

   The CIA brought Arabs to the U.S. and trained them in terrorism. The rules by which al Qaeda operate seem to come from the CIA training.

2. Blowback: The costs and consequences of American empire by Chalmers Johnson, 2000, Metropolitan Books, New York, New York, USA. Also, there was a new edition in 2003 with a new introduction. Reviews: Powell's

The NSA is stamping your PC with the Mark of the Beast, a... cookie? So if you ever visit a NSA website again they'll know it's a return visit? This is useful... how?

Oh, this is all about riling up room-temperature-IQ journalists (I'll be charitable and note I mean Fahrenheit) into another hissy-fit over the fact that Bush is still president. Never mind. Go read some history.

I was in a similar situation. If your boss is smart enough to write code, he is probably smart enough to see reason. You just have to have "proof" that you guys need to be using versioning etc. The problem lies in figuring out what consitutes "proof" for him. I suggest pointing out that he better have a damn good reason to go against industry best practices. During a previous stint (about 5 years) of consulting I found that using busswords like "Best Practices" when explaining this stuff to people really works. He probably won't understand at first but nobody wants to look like a dummy to his peers.

Another good angle: The first principle of sales is: "The fear of loss is greater than the desire for gain." Show him what he could lose if your outfit doesn't use industry standard tools. This is probably the most reliable method to sell anything. There's also lots of studies that show projects using versioning are more productive that teams that don't use it even when versioning is implemented in the middle of a project with an aggressive deadline. Steve McConnell's book _The_Software_Project_Survival_Guide
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1572316217/103-20 95419-7389469?v=glance&n=283155
from M$ Press has lots of usefull strategies and factoids. He also addresses the human factor in software projects. Good stuff.

He may also just not want to go through the learning curve associated with new tools. FWIW, that was part of the problem here. Using web based tools helped with user (and boss) acceptance around these parts. We're using a help desk application to track all sorts of IT trouble tickets as well as defects:
http://www.otrs.org/
OTRS (Open Ticket Request System) is an open source web based application written in PERL. So far we've had a good experience with it.

We've also implemented Subversion and Viewcvs. Both OTRS and Subversion/Viewcvs are running on a PC class box running SuSE 9.3. We're also using Very Quick Wiki:
http://veryquickwiki.croninsolutions.com/
as a easy (and quick!) way to share the progress of out software projects with the company's users. This was one of the easiest sells of all. I just installed it (very easy to install, drag and drop, uses Tomcat as server) and started using it. I sent out some project updates with a URL instead of the full text. Just pointed my users and boss toward the wiki page for the project. Now he's using it to keep notes about changes to be implemented in our enterprise systems.

Using the SuSE distro made all of this easier as all the servers (OTRS as well) are included, but your favorite distro will work just as well. We use SuSE because the last 4 or 5 versions have been well "groomed." The uptime on the box has been fantastic! Better in fact than our HP 9000's. :-p

HTH

I'm actually reading a great book on taxes and tax evasion that discusses the AMT...Perfectly Legal, by David Cay Johnston (ISBN 1591840694). Very interesting reading about it...according to him, by 2010 even blue collar workers stand a pretty good chance of being caught under the the AMT.

--trb

General Electric built the same damn thing, but back in 1970. (yes, 35 years
ago... they called them Man Amplifiers, and the GE design could lift a full metric
ton). All hydraulic, beautiful Dural girderwork, steel hydraulic motors and joints.
They had stand-erect versions and "walking jeeps" as well, and got a big article
in Popular Science, including "in action" photos with white-shirted, pocket-protectored,
bow-tied engineers heaving railroad ties like broomsticks.

When I got my first job and started working as an engineer at GE, 15 years later,
I saw the remains of them - rusting, on the junk pile, outside of the main R&D building
in Schenectady NY.

Now, even GE didn't *invent* them; read _Starship Troopers_ by Robert Heinlein; he talks
about the whole thing, including power limitations, but back in 1956:
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0441783589/002-48 22186-6189639?v=glance&n=283155

Authors are already commenting on things in Amazon. The most famous (to me at least) is Anne Rice, she of Interview with the Vampire. She even defended her own book and rated the movie based on her book. Amazon took the listing down for a bit but now it's back. (Look under the reviews in The Blood Canticle, her review is from Sep. 6th). To her credit, as weird and emotional as her response was, she offered anyone money back for the book if they didn't like it and I believe she sent all the unwanted books to the troops.

(I'm by no means an Anne Rice reader, I've never read a single paragraph of her work, but this obviously stood out in my memory).

Authors are already commenting on things in Amazon. The most famous (to me at least) is Anne Rice, she of Interview with the Vampire. She even defended her own book and rated the movie based on her book. Amazon took the listing down for a bit but now it's back. (Look under the reviews in The Blood Canticle, her review is from Sep. 6th). To her credit, as weird and emotional as her response was, she offered anyone money back for the book if they didn't like it and I believe she sent all the unwanted books to the troops.

(I'm by no means an Anne Rice reader, I've never read a single paragraph of her work, but this obviously stood out in my memory).

Anne Rice had some interaction with her fans a while ago on amazon.com over her then newly released book, Blood Canticle.

Link Here

Anyone know of any other instances when the author posted to amazon.com to defend his/her own work?

This would be a start:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0691116245/qid=11 35819476/sr=1-3/ref=sr_1_3/104-5361903-2512740?s=b ooks&v=glance&n=283155

Amazon Author's Profile

I was initially a skeptic, but having used it, I'm 100% behind the idea. You can see what an author's posting looks like here:

Untangling Tolkien

It's marvelous for an author wanting to promote books (existing or planned), answer critics, or write more detail about a book than Amazon usually posts. You can make a posting like that above to any of the Amazon detail pages for which you're the book's author. And you can link to outside sites for more information, including your own website.

If you're an author with a book for sale on Amazon, I'd strongly recommend joining. Just keep in mind that it is for authors only (not publishers), and only allows postings to books you've written or the Amazon home page of those who've bought your books. Also, it's one way, meaning the blog doesn't allow readers to post (probably a good thing). And at present it's only for Amazon U.S. Also, there is a careful vetting process to keep out trolls.

I give the idea Five Stars and a Thumbs Up. Amazon is to be commended for this.

--Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle

Amazon Author's Profile

I was initially a skeptic, but having used it, I'm 100% behind the idea. You can see what an author's posting looks like here:

Untangling Tolkien

It's marvelous for an author wanting to promote books (existing or planned), answer critics, or write more detail about a book than Amazon usually posts. You can make a posting like that above to any of the Amazon detail pages for which you're the book's author. And you can link to outside sites for more information, including your own website.

If you're an author with a book for sale on Amazon, I'd strongly recommend joining. Just keep in mind that it is for authors only (not publishers), and only allows postings to books you've written or the Amazon home page of those who've bought your books. Also, it's one way, meaning the blog doesn't allow readers to post (probably a good thing). And at present it's only for Amazon U.S. Also, there is a careful vetting process to keep out trolls.

I give the idea Five Stars and a Thumbs Up. Amazon is to be commended for this.

--Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle

foundry!=fab

Huh? Sir, are you sure you know what you are talking about? ;-) Yes, your inequality is correct, but in much weaker sense than you assume: since the dawn of modern CMOS (you know, Mead-Convay time, circa 1980) people referred to foundry as an outside place to make your chips.

Foundries have fabs, Intel also has fabs but (AFAIK) does not provide foundry services; IBM provides, e.g., SiGe foundry services, MOSIS is a foundry, etc.

Places where you get wafers are just "wafer suppliers", places which make masks are "mask houses"...

Paul B.

I'll see your Rachael Ray and raise you one Nigella Dawson.

And then I'll take a Giana DeLaurentiis for the win.

here

Dear Amazon, Please connect me with Rachael Ray ... Thank You

Sweet, maybe I can connect with the manufacturer of this

Can be found here with the little blurb Amazon Connect is a new program currently open to a select group of authors. This program allows authors to post messages directly to their readers on a wide variety of subjects. Currently, messages will appear on the detail page of an author's book as well as on her/his profile page. As part of the program, authors may create a profile page with personalized information.

For those who don't know:

The storys the poster is refering to can be found in the book Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!

(A Few Excerpts from the text)
Math Magic http://www.craigr.com/books/surely.htm
Education in Brazil (my favorite) http://www.wallaceinfo.com/feynman.asp

There is also a sequel What Do You Care What Other People Think?

Save yourself almost $17 by buying the book here: Securing IM and P2P Applications. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Save yourself almost $17 by buying the book here: Securing IM and P2P Applications. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

....is Eric Rescorla's SSL and TLS: Building Secure Systems. It's got excellent descriptions of how SSL works, including a chapter on various attacks (million message, small-subgroup, etc). He's got some nice stuff in chapter six about SSL server performance, too - talks about hardware acceleration and whatnot.

Oh, and, plug!

> people would rather be monosyllabic zombies than learn pronunciation and vocabulary. Why did it need to be "blog?" Was "web log" too hard to say?

What's wrong with efficiency?

In the time it takes to utter "pentasyllabic eruditism" I can utter 8 or 9 one-syllable words. The nine words, if well-chosen, can communicate vastly more information than the two, because the relationship between words can be just as informative as the words themselves. Think about the difference between English and German, for example.

The question of the superiority (or otherwise) of complicated vocabularies recalls to me two authors who in separate works used the assertion that Chinese lacked the complicated pluralisms of English to argue diametrically opposite points. Both authors said that Chinese used the equivalent of "two man" instead of "two men". The English author said that this showed Chinese was a wussy and degenerate tongue. The Chinese author (Jackie Chan, in his hilarious autobiographyI Am Jackie Chan: My Life In Action) said that Chinese was very efficient and sophisticated because the phrase "two man" sufficiently communicated the same idea as "two men" and did not require the unnecessary learning of an additional word.

I'm with Jackie on this. Linguistic efficiency = good.

I agree with what you said.

In my comment, I was talking about a REAL fix: Read the Recent Great Books. See the section "Understanding Your Inner Self" I especially recommend The Primal Scream: Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis.

Pimsleur -> It will make you feel like you're making progress and doesn't require a lot of motivation (just do it in the car).

Platiquemos -> I didn't see that anyone mentioned this one. It is an upgrade of the FSI course. I've done the FSI for French and it is fabulous and much much more complete than any other courses I have seen. I haven't done Platiquemos but I have every confidence it's even better than the original. See the site for comparisons with Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone (they're a little snide but pretty accurate). It's even cheaper than Pimsleur and R.S. yet is better. See http://language.bin.org/FXM/ for more language-learning tips and a testimonial of the FSI course.

Spanish for Reading -> Again, I have not done this for Spanish but there is a French version by the same author and it changed my language-learning life! You must try this book! I thought I didn't care about reading before, but it helps with speaking too.

Then, use SuperMemo for memorizing vocabulary and maybe read Barry Farber's How to Learn any Language for some inspiration and tips. And do what everyone else said. :) (TV, talking to people, etc.) If you can watch DVDs in Spanish (not dubbed--originally Spanish audio) with Spanish subtitles that is also very helpful.

I have a lot more to say about this but these would be what I would start with. :)

-MB (sd.t.mkb@spamgourmet.com)

Are Men Necessary?

Guys, our worst fears are coming true. I always heard that if women could make babies without us and figured out a way to open jars, we were not long for this earth. Well, check out this and this. Doh!

Save yourself $17.60 by buying the book here: Linux Troubleshooting. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Save yourself $17.60 by buying the book here: Linux Troubleshooting. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

...but these are not those books. If you want an absolute beginner's looks at Linux, check out Marcel Gagné's excellent Moving to Linux, Second Edition : Kiss the Blue Screen of Death Goodbye! (direct link, no paid click-through). Also worth noting is Paul Sheer's LINUX: Rute User's Tutorial and Exposition, that while a bit dated covers the basic concepts of Linux quite thoroughly and also makes quite a good reference guide. I would start with the former, but the latter is free online and the paperback inexpensive to purchase.

"The Rule of Law, in complex times,
Has proved itself deficient.
We much prefer the Rule of Men,
It's vastly more efficient!

Now let me state the present rules,"
The lawyer then went on,
"These very simple guidelines,
You can rely upon:

You're gouging on your prices if
You charge more than the rest.
But it's unfair competition if
You think you can charge less!

A second point that we would make
To help avoid confusion...
Don't try to charge the same amount,
That would be Collusion!

You must compete -- But not too much!
For if you do you see,
Then the market would be yours --
And that's Monopoly!"

Price too high? Or Price too low?
Now, which charge did they make?
Well, they weren't loath to charging both,
With Public Good at stake!

In fact, they went one better!
They charged "Monopoly!"
No muss, no fuss, oh, woe is us!
Egad, they charged ALL THREE!

In the immortal words of Handy "read a book". This is nothing new on the subject of procrastination. For an excellent overview of the psychology (pop) of the subject, as well as tips on dealing with it, check out The Now Habit by Neil Fiore.

Black cars and clothes are the reason for global warming. There we go.

These two men have a lot to answer for then!

The Miracle of Mindfulness by Thich Nhat Hahn. He is a Vietnamese Buddhist, and founder of Plum Village

Maybe that is true, of-itself, BUT

Agriculture remained, by-and-large, among the ones formed into it while growing-up, and if some agrarian population mixed geographically with some nomadic population, agriculture didn't take-over the nomads, the nomads just didn't establish+amplify their population, is all. . .

Moveable Type, Gutenberg's inventation, changed Humanity's process by to-great-degree democratizing publishing ( and therefore knowing ), and by changing-the-rules of perceiving/learning:
before then most were among
the Lower Tier of
the Two-Tiered Level-Playing-Field(tm), and
that invention changed our rules. . .

Anytime humanity's process changes, due to technology, it changes what ( portion/aspect ) of humanity survives now,
( though it may shorten our race's survival, since evolution doesn't think-ahead. . . )

highspeed internet, microwave ovens, "IM" ( though IRC seems to be better at knowledge-growing, and IM seems to be social-addiction in lieu of knowledge-growing ), the cellphone, websites reachable by anyone ( who isn't beneath Authoritarian Rule, and can afford the computer+electricity+access ). . .

These things change whom we interact-with, change how we interact, and therefore change the population that results, or is, next generation.

They also change our mind's forming, so that a brainscan of a young-person who's experiencing some particular instance of event won't experience it with the same kind-of brain-energy-pattern/shaping as what an old bastard like I would. . .

Which means that different human-potential manifestly-is, after-the-change. . .

Some schools of communications use video of that brain-scan-difference to hammer-home how
Making One's Work For One's Audience is something that cannot be based on the assumption
"They're All Like Me":
that one, IF one wants to communicate with a differently-formed group, has to understand their mode. . .

Marshal McLuhan's "The Medium Is The mAssage" was all about how electric technology changed US from river/story to modular/plugin mode.

( strange-capitalization is mine, spelling was HIS:
the bogo-meme that displaced what he said is pushed by
Mass Mindlessness, or MassMedia(tm), but
THINK, and DEMAND thinking, and one CAN gain,
in one's own evolving, damnit! )

PS: that "registry"-link is books I recommend to everyone, not "get 'em for me" ( you couldn't anyways: there's no address associated with that "registry" ). If you value using your remaining-life to make your-worth be your substance, actively, then consider 'em,
and if you consider any to be better, then tell me about 'em, please!
You can post a reply to any message of mine here on /. and I'll be notified 'bout it, which does-away-with spam-friendly e-mail. . .
And thanks in advance to any who clue-me-in to better/greater leverage, eh?

Maybe some of you might be interested.
This is the perfect gift for your ,(niece,stepdaughter,granddaughter).

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/B000 05NEBW/002-2703384-3222436?v=glance