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Gateway here we come!!!!

China == "Goldstein"? See 1984 by George Orwell

Skip the foreplay.

THE TCP/IP bible is TCP/IP Illustrated Volume 2 by the late W. Richard Stevens.

It's twenty bucks cheaper on Amazon

Save yourself almost THIRTY ($30) BUCKS by buying the book here: The TCP/IP Guide: A Comprehensive, Illustrated Internet Protocols Reference. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Save yourself almost THIRTY ($30) BUCKS by buying the book here: The TCP/IP Guide: A Comprehensive, Illustrated Internet Protocols Reference. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Whereas a chimpanzee may be considered an adult by age three, humans may not even reach (emotional) adulthood until well into their 30s.

Get this book.

and when I'm in shape, I can pedal hard enough to light at least 4 60 watt bulbs

Though to be fair, a small computer generally uses a good deal less than 240 watts. Even though you may have a 450 watt power supply, that's just a peak rating -- the average should be closer to 200 watts for most computers (though of course the very fastest cpus use a lot more, as do the latest video cards, and if you do SLI or SMP the power consumption goes through the roof.) These things aren't very expensive, but they're very useful in determining just how much power various things use.

Of course, the PPC chips are a lot more efficient. You could just get a Mac -- I'll bet that Mac Mini uses much less power, and the Mac cube used so little power that it got by without even having a cooling fan.

Seems to me I've heard this idea before...

background threads don't help with CPU intensive work on single processor boxes.

If you know enough about thread management to enter this conversation, then you would know about thread priority settings.

the GC and the JIT'er take CPU cycles, (and lots of them).

What takes lots of CPU cycles is poor design. If you find that you're creating and disposing of objects over-and-over again, such that your memory manager is kept noticeably busy, then it is time to revist your design, whatever the language. Simple memory-management in C++ can mask bad design, because inline malloc/dealloc (vs. the GC) will spread the task over time, instead of bunching it together like Java (on a properly prioritized background thread :), making it less noticeable, even though it might be a similar percent of CPU cycles utilized.

Good reading to this end:

Effective Java
Effective C++

The other thing is, when you use Java J2SE classes from the built-in libraries, you're working with sometimes very general-purpose classes, designed to handle lots of situations. General purpose can equal slow performance. If you want better performance, write better code, specific to the task at hand.

Also realize that Strings in Java are not at all like char[] in C++. Like I said, general purpose classes can be slow. You're better off rolling your own, at times.

Cheers.

The full reading list is posted online. The textbook is Richard Bartle's Designing Virtual Worlds along with other assorted readings.

[...] Feral children lack the basic social skills which are normally learned in the process of enculturation. For example, they may eat with their hands at a great rate, be unable to learn to use a toilet, have trouble learning to walk upright and display a complete lack of interest in the human activity around them. They often seem mentally impaired and have almost insurmountable trouble learning a human language. It is essentially impossible to convert a child who became isolated at a very young age into a relatively normal member of society.

Feral Children

Yes, some Lisp users give Lisp a bad name, and Lisp in general has been far less welcoming to new users than newer languages. Python, for example, is very welcoming and friendly to newbies. That's unfortunate, but it's far from universal, and there are indications that things are changing in the Lisp world, with the release of a new book last year (Practical Common Lisp, available free online as well as in dead tree format), and the Lisp in a Box project (download, install, and have a great (Free as in beer and freedom) Lisp environment set up in minutes).

Ever read Calculating God? In that story cancer is a deliberate mechanism left in creation. Without it you can't grow another "god".

Butter side up? Do people really eat it butter side down?

'Twas a reference to Dr. Seuss' The Butter Battle Book

#11. Seed AI installed on your users' machines will cause a Technological Singularity in 2006.

#12. Hotshot AI coders will waste countless hours learning to program good old-fashioned artificial intelligence (GOFAI) in old-fashioned stack-based Forth.

#13 Association for Computing Machinery will use your organization as a poster-child test-case for Seed AI gone amok.

#14 AI4U will lie around on people's desktops as a mark of prestige and sophistication, or as a last-ditch Christmas gift for obnoxious know-it-alls who have never been truly challenged in their pitiful lives.

#15. User Manuals will be totally disregarded or rewritten and sold on eBay.

The goal is simplicity in all things. Someone shouldn't have to think about what is going on, it should be obvious.

The most interesting thing about that book is that the author applies the same principles he espouses for websites to the book. The book is very easily digestible. So, if it works for the web and it works for the book... what else can it apply to? If you follow this train of thought to its logical conclusion you'll realize it applies to lots and lots of things: your code, desktops, phone VRUs, brochures, etc.

Linus is a smart guy and I respect him, but the goal is simple.

• 1 tot The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World to add a shot of realism
• 2 tots Code Complete so that the code is as good as possible
• 1 squeeze of The Inmates are Running the Asylum to keep the product useable
• 1 squeeze of The Pragmatic Programmer to keep the code maintanable and time well utilized
• 1 tot Rapid Development to come in under time and under budget
• 1 tot Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams to keep the gears from squeaking
• Use specialist books on the programming language, database and OS environments as mix
• Open head
• Mix ingrediants liberally with brain until fully stirred
• Chill and serve with umbrella

• 1 tot The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World to add a shot of realism
• 2 tots Code Complete so that the code is as good as possible
• 1 squeeze of The Inmates are Running the Asylum to keep the product useable
• 1 squeeze of The Pragmatic Programmer to keep the code maintanable and time well utilized
• 1 tot Rapid Development to come in under time and under budget
• 1 tot Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams to keep the gears from squeaking
• Use specialist books on the programming language, database and OS environments as mix
• Open head
• Mix ingrediants liberally with brain until fully stirred
• Chill and serve with umbrella

• 1 tot The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World to add a shot of realism
• 2 tots Code Complete so that the code is as good as possible
• 1 squeeze of The Inmates are Running the Asylum to keep the product useable
• 1 squeeze of The Pragmatic Programmer to keep the code maintanable and time well utilized
• 1 tot Rapid Development to come in under time and under budget
• 1 tot Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams to keep the gears from squeaking
• Use specialist books on the programming language, database and OS environments as mix
• Open head
• Mix ingrediants liberally with brain until fully stirred
• Chill and serve with umbrella

• 1 tot The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World to add a shot of realism
• 2 tots Code Complete so that the code is as good as possible
• 1 squeeze of The Inmates are Running the Asylum to keep the product useable
• 1 squeeze of The Pragmatic Programmer to keep the code maintanable and time well utilized
• 1 tot Rapid Development to come in under time and under budget
• 1 tot Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams to keep the gears from squeaking
• Use specialist books on the programming language, database and OS environments as mix
• Open head
• Mix ingrediants liberally with brain until fully stirred
• Chill and serve with umbrella

• 1 tot The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World to add a shot of realism
• 2 tots Code Complete so that the code is as good as possible
• 1 squeeze of The Inmates are Running the Asylum to keep the product useable
• 1 squeeze of The Pragmatic Programmer to keep the code maintanable and time well utilized
• 1 tot Rapid Development to come in under time and under budget
• 1 tot Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams to keep the gears from squeaking
• Use specialist books on the programming language, database and OS environments as mix
• Open head
• Mix ingrediants liberally with brain until fully stirred
• Chill and serve with umbrella

• 1 tot The Career Programmer: Guerilla Tactics for an Imperfect World to add a shot of realism
• 2 tots Code Complete so that the code is as good as possible
• 1 squeeze of The Inmates are Running the Asylum to keep the product useable
• 1 squeeze of The Pragmatic Programmer to keep the code maintanable and time well utilized
• 1 tot Rapid Development to come in under time and under budget
• 1 tot Peopleware : Productive Projects and Teams to keep the gears from squeaking
• Use specialist books on the programming language, database and OS environments as mix
• Open head
• Mix ingrediants liberally with brain until fully stirred
• Chill and serve with umbrella

shazbot, I hate replying to myself with followup, but for those who care, the book I mentioned above is: Influence: Science and Practice. It's a great book, it's worth reading, it illustrates exactly why people choose things expensive when they have no other criteria by which they can determine value, and, it is on topic! :-)

Agreed. Also, you may want to check out other books by Douglas R. Hofstadter. Lots of them are just as interesting. I particularly recommend Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern. It's a collection of his Scientific American column of the same name, with updates. Lots of computery things and other fun stuff.

Agreed. Also, you may want to check out other books by Douglas R. Hofstadter. Lots of them are just as interesting. I particularly recommend Metamagical Themas: Questing for the Essence of Mind and Pattern. It's a collection of his Scientific American column of the same name, with updates. Lots of computery things and other fun stuff.

Not a thick book, but really thought provoking. It starts off REALLY simple and builds and before you know it you realize you're learning about neural networks. Vehicles, Experiments in Synthetic Psychology.

If you want to understand Godel, then read his own work or texts about his work (like Godel's Proof by Ernest Nagel (thankfully only edited by Hofstadter, though I fail to discern why) and skip GEB.

I read GEB over 20 years ago, was bored silly and have regretted it ever since. It was perhaps the single most remarkable waste of time in my entire life.

So Wikipedia is the best place to find out things that most people already know? Fantastic.

By more widely known, I mean more published. There probably hasn't been much research into the life of John Seigenthaler. In fact, the closest to a biography I can see (only searched for 5 minutes) is a 3 page, 874 essay about him that you can buy on Amazon here . I mean, compared to say, the British Empire or Quantum Physics or a major world leader, John Seigenthaler is an unknown.

A short circuit between two spark plug wires on an engine which causes a cylinder to fire at the wrong time, or causes more than one cylinder to fire at a time. It is a BAD THING (tm).

...this guy? He definitely seems to be using the Opera.

such a simple question, and yet I'm thinking through all the books I've bought, and none of them really talk about what I've learned from my cranial osteopath or the biodynamic cranio-sacral therapist (superior, imho, to regular craniosacral therapy, as taught by the Upledger Institute) I've also worked with.

The Edgar Cayce Manual for Health through Drugless Therapy was written by an Osteopath, but he practiced before Dr. Sutherland's "cranial" technique (a supplemental to Andrew Still's system of osteopathic manipulation) became widespread.

If all you want to do is learn how to visualize, start with Win Wenger's techniques, or start by learning Self Hypnosis, or The Silva Method / Silva Ultramind, or start with a notepad to write down your dreams every morning (working towards waking up in your dreams, commonly known as "lucid dreaming").

In another post, I talked about how I discovered I had a problem 7 years ago... I missed the first week and a half of my senior year (I bumped my head, and don't remember 2 weeks), and went out on the internet to get information about speed reading, so I could catch up in my classes. I ended up buying Win's The Einstein Factor, which uses visualization for creative problem solving. "Wow, neat, I want to be able to do that." Win says that visualization is a natural human ability, and even people who don't visualize can easily be taught.

For me, Win Wenger's methods didn't work. So I picked up a silva method book. Then self-hypnosis books. These books all have steps to follow techniques to get the skills (creative problem solving, self mind control, visualization, etc) promised. I was also interested in Lucid Dreaming, and learned all I could about dreaming, what to do, which vitamins to take, etc. I did all these things, and still I couldn't even remember anything more than the tiniest fragments of my dreams when I woke in the morning, let alone "picture" something when I was wide-awake.

After stumbling around for six years, I figured that my problem was related to my disfunctional body, and that I needed an osteopath to fix that. My mother frequently told me what a difficult baby I was. Now I know that crying is an indication that baby hurts. Osteopathic Manipulation is especially good for children - ADHD, chronic childhood ear infections, ... etc. - all are a good indication that the kid's body is out of alignment, and needs proper attention.

Dr. D. says that one of the purposes of osteopathic treatment is to remove trauma from the body. I needed osteopathic treatment because of unresolved brith trauma and the afore-mentioned head injury. Most people (99.9+%) are nowhere near as bad as I was, and can learn visualization without going through all the hoops I've been through.

Healing Through Cranial Osteopathy by Tajinder Deoora - I don't have this book, but it does seem like a good modern take on what Cranial Osteopathy is good for.

Also see chapter 2 of Andrew Weil's Spontaneous Healing.

(not all Osteopaths are equally talented. The most specialized form of osteopathic manipulation treats the patient's visual perception, but my osteopath says there's only about 100 D.O.'s in the country who've taken the training. Cranio-Sacral therapy is osteopathic manipulation done by non-osteopaths. Your mileage will vary with CST practitioners - some are very good, some so-so, some have just taken a week or two of courses & set up shop as a CST. Biodynamic certification is a good indication of competency; some Biodynamic practitioners may be more advanced than cranial-academy certified docs.... ? - gotta build your own road map here. :)

Hope this helps.

Don't forget the 4th here

I've seen numerous postings regarding the GOF Patterns book which no programmer's bookshelf should be without. One book I've also enjoyed reading and might be useful for other developers especially if you inherit someone's else's programming mess is "AntiPatterns".

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0471197130/ theantipatterngr/103-3030967-9900659

It's amazing what you can do with an awk one-liner, and this is the book to get you going on it.

Hmmm... why not Amateur Perl Debugging? If you're a pro at Perl, why would you need to debug? Anyway...

Save yourself some money by buying the book here: Pro Perl Debugging. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Hmmm... why not Amateur Perl Debugging? If you're a pro at Perl, why would you need to debug? Anyway...

Save yourself some money by buying the book here: Pro Perl Debugging. And if you use the "secret" A9.com discount, you can save an extra 1.57%!

Are you trying to say that there are stupid people out there that would rather carry an entire corpse to a authentication terminal, rather than delve into the gruesome arts of exacto-knifing those certain finger digits and eyeballs; to assemble a casted mould and a facial mask articulated to correct skin tone with the eyes precisely duplicated in a holographic-depth spectre surface (holographic printer, or inexpensive homemade holography, Holography technique, or even the Amature Holograph Society?) There are even inexpensive technical courses that improves this matter, that can be easily used to purvey an eye-scanner. There is nothing to hide; the technologies thought to provide more security and safety, other than brute-force and immediate consumption, were defeated the moment they were activated. I suppose someone can create every necessary part of a body in three-dimensional clay and it'll pass a scanner test.

I think the counter-actions that inexpensively defeat all the security measures are in good faith, whereas anyone that is coerced to wave standard good-faith handshaking rules and passkeys in their account to a more public and global access have already waived what little security and safety there was meant. I suggest people move their fortunes with them wherever they may need it. This is all the fault of a world-ready currency and central banking, then to let people carry specie in their pockets with a firearm to anyone that wants to take their demurred and stored compensation and barter representations of hard labor.

This is a defintie read for anyone who needs to understand how programmer's (especially Open Source developers) work. Best Computer related history I have ever read !
Rebel Code: Linux and the Open Source Revolution

Yes, I know the text itself is public domain and can be D/L'd from project Gutenburg. But the real value here are the extensive historical end-notes that put things in context and explain things you would miss otherwise. It's a good view into the thoughts and training of those who seek power so that you know what you're up against.

use a reputable dealer like Amazon or NewEgg for any electronics.

Also, since this article is about cameras: B&H Photo http://www.bhphotovideo.com/ is well respected. Not the bottom barrel cheapest, but reputable and I've never had a problem with them.

NewEgg http://www.newegg.com/ is great, although they've recently defaulted to UPS (oops) shipping, and FedEx now costs extra.
Amazon http://www.amazon.com/ is okay, but make sure you're actually buying from Amazon directly, and not one of the scammy "partner stores" which link off of the Amazon page.

Here is my bookshelf: with cover images, without cover images, and with cover images ordered by color.

Here is my bookshelf: with cover images, without cover images, and with cover images ordered by color.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0887308589The Dilbert Principle. He'll love it, I did.

EDIT: Thanks to Yakumo for correcting the misinformation regarding the price. Gamefront.de lists it at 10.000 Yen, but it's 15.800 Yen (approx. 112 Euro/ $133)! It's still a nice price in my opinion.

Can someone tell me if this is really worth it? For that price I could buy a Gamecube or a GameBoy. For less than $20 more, I could get PS2. Granted, these are not bundles, but these systems have more games available. The PS2 can run linux. What sets the Dreamcast apart from it?

This isn't meant to sound as a troll; I've simply never looked into the Dreamcast as a possible system and would like to know if it's really worth it.

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0449908577/103-09 72882-3463854?v=glance&n=283155

My own personal bookshelf includes a multitude of Java textbooks and references (I'm a high school CS teacher), one of which is programming.java by Decker and Hirshfield which was my college textbook in CS 141 and 142 and good ole HamTech. I also have my other college texts: Structured Computer Organization by Tanenbaum, Fundamentals of Sequential and Parallel Algorithms by Berman and Paul, Programming Languages by Sethi, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Russell and Norvig and a handful of reference materials (Learning GNU Emacs, Java in a Nutshell, C++ for Java Programmers, The Practice of Programming, and Learning the UNIX Operating System). But by far, the two books that I have in my collection that I would recommend are Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Persig and Soul of a New Machine by Kidder. Both were required reading in college CS courses, the profs in the dept thought that if we were to graduate with a CS degree, these were two books that we needed to read, they were right. Excellent books, and something more interesting as a gift than a reference book. The third book to suggest would be Just For Fun by Torvalds and Diamond. While I haven't read it myself yet, I thought it would be helpful to include two suggestions of books that I have read and one that is on my wish list...

My own personal bookshelf includes a multitude of Java textbooks and references (I'm a high school CS teacher), one of which is programming.java by Decker and Hirshfield which was my college textbook in CS 141 and 142 and good ole HamTech. I also have my other college texts: Structured Computer Organization by Tanenbaum, Fundamentals of Sequential and Parallel Algorithms by Berman and Paul, Programming Languages by Sethi, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Russell and Norvig and a handful of reference materials (Learning GNU Emacs, Java in a Nutshell, C++ for Java Programmers, The Practice of Programming, and Learning the UNIX Operating System). But by far, the two books that I have in my collection that I would recommend are Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Persig and Soul of a New Machine by Kidder. Both were required reading in college CS courses, the profs in the dept thought that if we were to graduate with a CS degree, these were two books that we needed to read, they were right. Excellent books, and something more interesting as a gift than a reference book. The third book to suggest would be Just For Fun by Torvalds and Diamond. While I haven't read it myself yet, I thought it would be helpful to include two suggestions of books that I have read and one that is on my wish list...

My own personal bookshelf includes a multitude of Java textbooks and references (I'm a high school CS teacher), one of which is programming.java by Decker and Hirshfield which was my college textbook in CS 141 and 142 and good ole HamTech. I also have my other college texts: Structured Computer Organization by Tanenbaum, Fundamentals of Sequential and Parallel Algorithms by Berman and Paul, Programming Languages by Sethi, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach by Russell and Norvig and a handful of reference materials (Learning GNU Emacs, Java in a Nutshell, C++ for Java Programmers, The Practice of Programming, and Learning the UNIX Operating System). But by far, the two books that I have in my collection that I would recommend are Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Persig and Soul of a New Machine by Kidder. Both were required reading in college CS courses, the profs in the dept thought that if we were to graduate with a CS degree, these were two books that we needed to read, they were right. Excellent books, and something more interesting as a gift than a reference book. The third book to suggest would be Just For Fun by Torvalds and Diamond. While I haven't read it myself yet, I thought it would be helpful to include two suggestions of books that I have read and one that is on my wish list...