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1. Quest
2. Adventure
3. Pursuit
4. Rescue
5. Escape
6. Reven ge
7. TheRiddle
8. Rivalry
9. Underdog
10. Temptation
11. Meta morphosis
12. Transformation
13. Maturation
14. Love
15. Forbi dden Love
16. Sacrifice
17. Discovery
18. Wretched Excess
19. Ascension
20. Descension

As an example of one of the dramatic situations: stranger comes from the heavens, has the power to heal people (and does so), is misunderstood and hunted by authorities. Dies, is resurcted, and ascends to the heavens ... jesus or ET? :)

The Elegant Universe is one the best books I have ever read. It helped me to understand many aspects of physics that I couldn't quite grasp when reading other books. I couldn't recommend it more.

In the book, an accidental massive nuking of clathrate deposits causes a runaway greenhouse effect. Not pretty...

I think he was talking about much larger deposits than this, though, and a heck of a big nuke (well, antimatter, I seem to recall. Details...).

In any case, it's a pretty good story for the weather effects, but there are some very disturbing sexual scenes, so you've been warned...

I picked up his books years back, and they are all great. Most are very easy going reads, if you are into reading about physics. He uses a lot of good analogies that get your mind working.

Here's a BN.com link:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/result s.asp?WRD=michio+kaku&userid=529XSYBO5D

Understanding Physics by Issac Asimov:It may be too much for the lay person if you already have some background in physics but the writing is incredibly lucid.

Try The World Treasury of Physics, Astronomy, and Mathematics

Excerpts from Einstein, Feynman, Schwinger, Hawking, Turing, von Neumann, etc.

-tharant

The one major criticism you can make is that mechanics are covered without using the Lagrangian formalism, which is much more powerful and much more applicable to quantum mechanics. For this, you may want to check out Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics. This is a very dense book but it covers a lot, and in a way geared towards programmers. Warning: uses the Scheme programming language heavily. If you don't like Scheme, you won't like this one.

For general relativity, I highly, highly recommend A First Course in General Relativity. The prerequisites are pretty minimal, and it's extremely well written.

Beyond that, check out John Baez's list of favorite books. Actually, you might want to read anything and everything Professor Baez has to say about physics, he knows a lot, explains it very well and is willing to talk to people. He's one of the few working physicists who still bothers with usenet. I'm currently working through his book on Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity, and am enjoying it immensely.

The one major criticism you can make is that mechanics are covered without using the Lagrangian formalism, which is much more powerful and much more applicable to quantum mechanics. For this, you may want to check out Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics. This is a very dense book but it covers a lot, and in a way geared towards programmers. Warning: uses the Scheme programming language heavily. If you don't like Scheme, you won't like this one.

For general relativity, I highly, highly recommend A First Course in General Relativity. The prerequisites are pretty minimal, and it's extremely well written.

Beyond that, check out John Baez's list of favorite books. Actually, you might want to read anything and everything Professor Baez has to say about physics, he knows a lot, explains it very well and is willing to talk to people. He's one of the few working physicists who still bothers with usenet. I'm currently working through his book on Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity, and am enjoying it immensely.

The one major criticism you can make is that mechanics are covered without using the Lagrangian formalism, which is much more powerful and much more applicable to quantum mechanics. For this, you may want to check out Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics. This is a very dense book but it covers a lot, and in a way geared towards programmers. Warning: uses the Scheme programming language heavily. If you don't like Scheme, you won't like this one.

For general relativity, I highly, highly recommend A First Course in General Relativity. The prerequisites are pretty minimal, and it's extremely well written.

Beyond that, check out John Baez's list of favorite books. Actually, you might want to read anything and everything Professor Baez has to say about physics, he knows a lot, explains it very well and is willing to talk to people. He's one of the few working physicists who still bothers with usenet. I'm currently working through his book on Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity, and am enjoying it immensely.

The one major criticism you can make is that mechanics are covered without using the Lagrangian formalism, which is much more powerful and much more applicable to quantum mechanics. For this, you may want to check out Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics. This is a very dense book but it covers a lot, and in a way geared towards programmers. Warning: uses the Scheme programming language heavily. If you don't like Scheme, you won't like this one.

For general relativity, I highly, highly recommend A First Course in General Relativity. The prerequisites are pretty minimal, and it's extremely well written.

Beyond that, check out John Baez's list of favorite books. Actually, you might want to read anything and everything Professor Baez has to say about physics, he knows a lot, explains it very well and is willing to talk to people. He's one of the few working physicists who still bothers with usenet. I'm currently working through his book on Gauge Fields, Knots and Gravity, and am enjoying it immensely.

i would also suggest to grab surely you are joking mr.feynman along with those epitomic 3 volumes. feynman is a wizard. he has his own way of explaining things. you should feel comfortable while reading his lectures only then you would enjoy them.

i dont remember quite well but, if you are looking for some serious intensive basic physics exercises there used to be 2 volumes which i studied in the school. the authors were "Resnick and Halliday". we just remembered them by the author name, sorry i dont know wat the book was called.

my $0.02

aky

I thought JSP, Servlets and MySQL had some good JSP and MySQL content in it.

If you're looking to learn PHP, you should check out the documentation on PHP.net.

If you want to learn ASP, try Planet Source Code.

Step one is to decide on the platform and language you want to learn first. They all have their advantages and disadvantages.

There's also Linux Assembly Language Programming

Author's website
Signed edition available
Article on CNN about marketing the book
buy at Amazon
Buy at B+N
Review on Salon
Excerpt available

Just reading the section on "Classic Mistakes" is enlightening enough (to develop efficiently, you have to avoid all the classic mistakes).

The author also points out that when workers do more than 40 hrs/wk, they do more personal stuff at work, and tend to decrease their productivity. You can't dispense with life just by wishing it away.

1. naturalism, the foundation upon which Darwinism exists, is dogmatic at it's core, unneccessarily restricts the boundaries of truth (ie, we don't care if God is outside the realm of the testable, we want to know if it's true),
   
2. Darwinism cannot possibly account for complex structures (see Darwin on Trial and Darwins Black Box ), a certain "irreducable complexity" exists and;
   
3. since naturalism is false, an intelligent designer must account for the biodiversity and complexity that we see.
   

1. naturalism, the foundation upon which Darwinism exists, is dogmatic at it's core, unneccessarily restricts the boundaries of truth (ie, we don't care if God is outside the realm of the testable, we want to know if it's true),
   
2. Darwinism cannot possibly account for complex structures (see Darwin on Trial and Darwins Black Box ), a certain "irreducable complexity" exists and;
   
3. since naturalism is false, an intelligent designer must account for the biodiversity and complexity that we see.
   

1. naturalism, the foundation upon which Darwinism exists, is dogmatic at it's core, unneccessarily restricts the boundaries of truth (ie, we don't care if God is outside the realm of the testable, we want to know if it's true),
   
2. Darwinism cannot possibly account for complex structures (see Darwin on Trial and Darwins Black Box ), a certain "irreducable complexity" exists and;
   
3. since naturalism is false, an intelligent designer must account for the biodiversity and complexity that we see.
   

For more on Ted Taylor -- his work on fission bombs, his participation in Project Orion, his speculations on how small a nuclear bomb could topple the World Trade Center towers (decades ago), and his concerns about nuclear proliferation -- I strongly recommend John McPhee's The Curve of Binding Energy (BN). McPhee (BN) is an excellent writer, and this is one of his books I enjoyed the most.

For more on Ted Taylor -- his work on fission bombs, his participation in Project Orion, his speculations on how small a nuclear bomb could topple the World Trade Center towers (decades ago), and his concerns about nuclear proliferation -- I strongly recommend John McPhee's The Curve of Binding Energy (BN). McPhee (BN) is an excellent writer, and this is one of his books I enjoyed the most.

What really matters is that they use Instant Runoff Voting

Before you guys get too caught up promoting IRV, please read Chap 2 of Political Numeracy by Meichael Meyerson for some stiff discussion of the caveats of all voting "algorithms" including IRV (although he doesn't refer to it by that buzzword).

This world is about atrocity. Face it. Where the fuck were you when the genocide was taking place in Rwanda?

Your 11@m4 |*05t was an obvious attempt to get flamed, prolly because your momma never gave you 'nuff affection as a child. Fucking wah! I'm sure you love being the center of attention.

But when that shit went down in Rwanda, I certainly would hope, for the sake of the validity of your claim, that in that entire time you never watched a movie for entertainment purposes, read a work of fiction, listen to or enjoyed a piece of music, or took the time to fuck your girl/boyfriend or whatever the fuck it is you like to spew your sickly bodyfluids onto...No, not a righteous idealisitc fuck like you! You were in the thick of battle trying to stop the Tutsi massacre taking the guns out of the hands of the Hutu militia and handing them flowers in compensation. A job welldone there, you then moved onto Serbia to stop the slaughter of Muslims. Having a taste for saving human life, you then went personally to Chechnya to stop the Russians from doing the same thing there. Not once did you ever take the time to create or enjoy a creative work! You just took a fucking breather from all the good fucking work that you do to surf the web (which consumes energy which is sorely needed by the underpriviliged) to tell me how the fuck to live MY fucking life!

YOu are a fucking joke! Self righteous pussy!

This world is about atrocity. Face it. Where the fuck were you when the genocide was taking place in Rwanda?

Your 11@m4 |*05t was an obvious attempt to get flamed, prolly because your momma never gave you 'nuff affection as a child. Fucking wah! I'm sure you love being the center of attention.

But when that shit went down in Rwanda, I certainly would hope, for the sake of the validity of your claim, that in that entire time you never watched a movie for entertainment purposes, read a work of fiction, listen to or enjoyed a piece of music, or took the time to fuck your girl/boyfriend or whatever the fuck it is you like to spew your sickly bodyfluids onto...No, not a righteous idealisitc fuck like you! You were in the thick of battle trying to stop the Tutsi massacre taking the guns out of the hands of the Hutu militia and handing them flowers in compensation. A job welldone there, you then moved onto Serbia to stop the slaughter of Muslims. Having a taste for saving human life, you then went personally to Chechnya to stop the Russians from doing the same thing there. Not once did you ever take the time to create or enjoy a creative work! You just took a fucking breather from all the good fucking work that you do to surf the web (which consumes energy which is sorely needed by the underpriviliged) to tell me how the fuck to live MY fucking life!

YOu are a fucking joke! Self righteous pussy!

Bruce Schneier gives a good overview here.
The table of contents is here.

And while you have this snazzy sword fighting algorithim taking place ala SnowCrash, just what are you going to use to control it? A joystick? Mouse? Or joy-of-all-joys: a Linux driven Nintendo Power Glove... (On a side note, I just hate using the slashdot search engine. Using the words "Linux" and "Nintendo" yielded my target 13 links down... And how many of those other links had anything to do with, or even the word Nintendo in their title? None.)

I recently founded a services company (rivertechnologies net) - here's my $.02 based on my personal experiences, in no particular order. As a point of reference my BG is in distributed systems development, integration, security, proj. mgmt, etc.

Pick your target market carefully. Don't limit yourself to any one vertical, but don't use rand() to pick a company out of the yellow pages either! Our clients are primarily in banking, which works well for us, because (a) we know the business from the IT POV, (b) banks are always going to be in business as a pillar of the economy and (c) non IT companies are always looking to outsource non-core, revenue-generating activities, e.g. systems integration & development. The catch is to make sure that the services you can provide are ones that aren't 'disposable'...a lot of trends come and go, but the CIO will always have 20 things on their to-do list that they HAVE to get done. Prove to them that you can get it done, do it a few times, and now you have a valuable service.

Develop a business plan. Go to inc.com and read up on their material. Find 5 people who did what you want to do and were successful, and talk to them. Then talk to 5 others who weren't. Consider how you plan on funding yourself. Bootstrapping a firm puts things in perspective - if it doesn't make us $, and it costs $, and we don't need it, then we don't do it. No Aeron chairs and 21" TFTs here, at least for now ;)

Consider your competitors. You are essentially looking to start what I would refer to as a commodity service - S/W eng, security services, systems integration, etc. is a highly saturated market. Everyone can find 10 decent 1099'ers who can do that, and there are slews of companies who do it very well, and are HUGE. The catch here is to develop your core offering(s) to appeal to your target market because there is something about you that makes you 'different'. I don't mean in a BS kind of way either...there has to be something about you and your s/w firm that will compel someone to say, "I don't want to send this job to India, because these guys: know my business/have expertise here/add value in some other way, etc."

How hard are you willing to work? Did you say 80h a week? OK good! If you are not willing to give 110%, then I wouldn't do it. If you have a wife/kids, or other commitments, talk it over with them first. Being successful at work doesn't mean much if your kids forget what you look like!

Consider your sales cycle. How long does it take to generate revenue based on your business model? How much $$$ runway do you have? Consider how long it will take you to get the business up & running before you can actually start selling yourselves.

Learn to think like the anti-Christ (a sales-person). Unless you are going to hire a sales manager you can trust, you will have to be well-versed in the sales cycle, and how to effectively sell your services in the timeframe that you have to work with. I would recommend two excellent books here:
"The New Strategic Selling" by Heiman & Sanchez, and "Selling to VITO" by Anthony Parinello. (the 2nd book is great but clearly the guy is an egotistical dickhead who thinks techies are peons who get in his way.) If you don't have the stomach to sell to people, then you aren't going to do very well, unless you can convince 100 people to bang down your door asking for your svcs.

When you get all caught up in the non propeller-head activities in running an IT firm, you have to make sure you can stay current with industry trends, what is going on with your target market, and so forth. It is a catch-22 at times, as skills alone won't make your business grow, but if you can't deliver, than you surely won't grow.

Make sure you have 100% faith in your partners. Make sure they can contribute as much as you can; if they can't make sure the partnership is arranged accordingly. Have some philosophical discussions, and make sure that you guys are on the same page. Does he want to grow into a $10M company, and you will be happy with $100K a year and the company car? This can lead to some sticky issues if you are not both on the same page.

So far this has been undoubtedly the most gratifying professional thing I have done, and even if we closed shop up tomorrow, I feel as though it has enabled me to grow unlike any other gig I have done before.

It totally redefines the meaning of "Steal
This Book."

Pre-Night Court, Harry Anderson was a professional magician. Still is, I guess, but I bring it up to recommend his book Games You Can't Lose (B&N). He covers a lot, and with great style, including Blackjack strategy and winning legally at Craps, including the really good bets that they don't mark on the tables.

Plus, for all those hotshots out there who think it's cool to get tossed out of a casino, Anderson was banned from playing cards anywhere in the state of Nevada. Tells the story in the book....

N

Try Barnes & Noble instead. I noticed they have an ISBN search

You should read "Business @ The Speed of Stupid" by Dan Burke and Alan Morrison - ISBN:0-7382-0542-7.

It's full of stories of supposedly smart people making big mistakes by being overconfident, or led astray by their boss/client/whatever.

The URL for the book, at Barnes and Noble, is: http://search.barnesandnoble.com/booksearch/isbnIn quiry.asp?isbn=0738205427

I'm in the middle of it myself - the first half is a bunch of example stupidity-induced-failures, the second half is a bunch of theorising/proselytising by the authors on what a company should do to avoid the same stupid mistakes. It's funny to watch people trying to codify common sense.

I don't remember any Beethoven compositions for glass harmonica but am not at all sure there weren't any. Glass Harmonica was very popular for a while. More recently composers including possibly Stravinsky and Hindemith (from vague memory, don't hold me to that) have composed for it as well.

Franklin also invented a more efficient fireplace, which he also built and sold. He was offered a patent on this by the Governor of Pennsylvania but refused.

That as we enjoy great advantages from the inventions of others, we should be glad of an opportunity to serve others by any invention of ours, and this we should do freely and generously.
-BF

He thought the idea of intellectual property to be a bit kooky.

If you're curious, read more about Franklin in the excellent biography The First American

Let me give you an example. In the US there is a wine company that sells itself as Cabris, which is actually a region in France that is know to sell a good white wine. Well the American company took advantage of this to "con" people. The French region on the other hand has problems now because people get confused by the marketing message.

I very much enjoyed JSP, Servlets, and MySQL published by Wiley, although I think it dicusses Tomcat 3. They also have a MySQL/PHP Database Applications book. I found the JSP book very good for someone who has familiarity with other server-side scripting languages but hasn't dabbled much with Java technologies.

I very much enjoyed JSP, Servlets, and MySQL published by Wiley, although I think it dicusses Tomcat 3. They also have a MySQL/PHP Database Applications book. I found the JSP book very good for someone who has familiarity with other server-side scripting languages but hasn't dabbled much with Java technologies.

Professional Audio On Linux?

Many comments, mostly about software and Macs.
There are some Linux Sound Hardware comments.

The "Linux Music and Sound" book is recommended.

• Half.Com entry
• Barnes & Noble

Oh yeah, HBO is so great. I know so many people who swear by that puke fest of a show, Sex in the City.

You mean people watch Sex in the City? Huh. No, I suggest HBO for the real quality stuff, like Sopranos and Six Feet Under, and the occasional mini-series (Band of Brothers was awesome). Right, so you're saying, "Pay for HBO? Just for a Sunday night line-up? What am I going to watch the rest of the week?" Not a problem. That goes to the rest of my post -- get out of the house! Or read a book (I'm reading A Secret Histroy, the first volume in the book of Ash). Hell, if you have to be geeky, go write some code. Point being, there's a ton of better things to do than watch TV (yeah, like I'm one to talk, considering what I've spent on my entertainment center. but until AT&T Broadband starts broadcasting HD content, it's pretty much a waste as far as TV goes. Much better for DVDs and my HTPC).

For example if youwere a 2 dimensional being(thats not possible coz 3 is the minumum number of dimensions to sustain life) and a 3D sphere passed through your space, you will see a point, growing into a circle and then again into a point.

Actually, all you would see was a line that got bigger and then smaller. That assumes that you are a 2D being living in a 2D world. In that world, you would only be able to see things from along the plane that you live in. However, if the sphere passed through a plane that was perpendicular to yours, you would see what you describe. For more info on this, read the book Flatland. An interesting read for stretching your mind and pretty funny in parts. At least for a /. crowd.

This could get modded as offtopic, but having experienced flow myself in my job is extremely cool.

Imagine if GM said you could open the hood of a car? Would the american public stand for that? (emphasis added)

OK, OK, I shouldn't make fun of someone just because they pressed "Submit" too fast. But the slip opens up an interesting thought in my mind: It is a fact of history that in World War II, American infantry units were the only ones to get progressively more mechanized as a campaign went on. For most armies, continuing action meant trucks and tanks broke down (bad maintenance, lack of supplies, etc.). But for the US, the infantry units would gain mechanized capacity. It was not unheard of that a unit not have to march anywhere, having scrounged enough vehicles to ride. This made the infantry many times more effective and enhanced the efficiency of armor, too (since the infantry could keep up with the tanks).

It doesn't seem that, with the wear-and-tear of battle, you should get more capacity. What was the secret? Well, just about every man in a US unit had some experience with motor vehicles. Most owned their own; many if not all repaired their own. So on the battlefield, they were able to scrabble spare parts together and keep the trucks rolling. In fact, they were often able to scavenge from damaged enemy machines! When a truck or car broke down, most armies had to call in a specialist repair team. But the US infantry could fix it themselves and keep moving. (Source: Dirty Little Secrets of World War II , Dunnigan and Nofi)

What's the point? Well, consider that everyone thinks sooner or later we're going to get into a "cyberwar" -- assaults upon information infrastructure. Maybe our only chance of winning such a conflict is to have legions of people familiar with computers and security, with securing a system or attacking it, with picking apart a program and then putting it back together better. In other words, maybe we need a culture of "hackers" (in both sense) as an insurance policy.

In which case, the DMCA is not just intrusive and unbalanced. It's actually a threat to national security. How do you like them apples?

tells us all about the military's secret robots capbable of single-handedly kicking all of Hong Kong's contengent of the Big Bad Red Army.

While Jefferson certainly didn't think that it is a fundamental right to control your works, copyright history didn't start there.

For a fuller perspective, including the sources of attitudes that most corporations prefer, I can highly recommend Mark Rose's Authors and Owners: The Invention of Copyright which traces the creation of the notion of copyright as a property (and the subsequent question about whether it should be permanent).

I like the Great War series, but I think The Guns of the South is more entertaining. And, in particular, the detail paid to Lee and his reactions to slavery.

this is ot, but this reminds me of an excellent book I read a few years ago, The Guns of the South by Harry Turtledove.. very interesting "what if" type alternate history in which the South does win... and the results of such that Turtledove postulates are fairly surprising.

What?!?

The Swarm! You forgot The Swarm!

I watched his show on making biscuits, realized it's easier than coding, and now that it's hard to find work coding, I cook and watch cooking shows.

But seriously, fans of Alton Brown will want to read the sourcebook that Alton must consult twelve times for every show:

McGee, Harold On Food and Cooking: The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, Simon & Schuster Fireside, 1984

A random selection of chapters and subsections:

Egg Foams
Slaughter, Aging, and Storage
The Four Basic Food Molecules
The Nature of Digestion
Browning Reactions and Flavor
Nutritional Fads in the United States

He's got the botanical defintion of the difference between fruit and vegetable; why fish meat is totally different from land-animal meat; electron micrographs of various kinds of candy, yeast, gluten, and the development of cheddar cheese, among others; tables of changes in the many tissues of meat at different temperatures, etc. There are few recipes but lots of chemistry diagrams, and an appendix on Atoms, Molecules, and Energy for those who need an easy leg up. It's less a how-to-cook book than a how-cooking-works book.

It's more scientific and contains enough material for about ten seasons of Good Eats. Which is okay, because my TiVo isn't even close to being retired.

--Blair

How could I forget...

Kitchen Confidential

The beginning is a primer on the history of saucemaking, and a guide to the tools, techniques, and science to great sauce making. I HIGHLY recommend this to anyone with at least a passing interest in cooking great food.