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Hey, NIST, quit bogarting all the ytterbium! We need it to make Hilbert Drives!

Jeff is more widely known for writing computer books, including books on Turbo Pascal and x86 assembly language, Degunking Windows, and Jeff Duntemann's Drive-By Wi-Fi Guide, and for editing one of the better programming magazines of the 90's, PC Techniques (later Visual Developer Magazine), but his SF work is worth anyone's time. The Cunning Blood , his first published novel, is classical hard SF jam-packed with information and ideas, including a prison planet without electricity, kept that way by nanotechnological devices that eat active electrical conductors. (The inhabitants of the planet have developed many non-electrical technologies into a fairly advanced society.) It also posits life after death...with the effects thereof mainly visible at the femtometer scale. (You'll have to read it to understand what that means, and the significance that point has.)

Another group of his works involves the survivors of a lost starship that have built a new home on an Earthlike world...which has thousands of strange machines left on it by an unknown race, consisting of two pillars and a bowl of dust. Tap on the pillars 256 times, in any combination, and an object will appear in the dust. Simple patterns produce simple objects, like saws, knives, and rope; more complex patterns are likely only to produce indescribable metal "thingies," but certain patterns produce powerful objects indeed. The resulting world has something of a "steampunk" flavor in parts, with an additional strong resemblance to frontier America. For one of the books in this universe, he's teamed up with another local author to revive the old Ace Doubles-style book, with two novella-length works bound "back to back" in one volume.

He's currently working on a quite different novel, Ten Gentle Opportunities, that combines fantasy, SF, and humor in some surprising ways. Among other things, it features--I am not making this up--zombies doing the Macarena.

Read more from Jeff on his Web site and blog.

Jeff is more widely known for writing computer books, including books on Turbo Pascal and x86 assembly language, Degunking Windows, and Jeff Duntemann's Drive-By Wi-Fi Guide, and for editing one of the better programming magazines of the 90's, PC Techniques (later Visual Developer Magazine), but his SF work is worth anyone's time. The Cunning Blood , his first published novel, is classical hard SF jam-packed with information and ideas, including a prison planet without electricity, kept that way by nanotechnological devices that eat active electrical conductors. (The inhabitants of the planet have developed many non-electrical technologies into a fairly advanced society.) It also posits life after death...with the effects thereof mainly visible at the femtometer scale. (You'll have to read it to understand what that means, and the significance that point has.)

Another group of his works involves the survivors of a lost starship that have built a new home on an Earthlike world...which has thousands of strange machines left on it by an unknown race, consisting of two pillars and a bowl of dust. Tap on the pillars 256 times, in any combination, and an object will appear in the dust. Simple patterns produce simple objects, like saws, knives, and rope; more complex patterns are likely only to produce indescribable metal "thingies," but certain patterns produce powerful objects indeed. The resulting world has something of a "steampunk" flavor in parts, with an additional strong resemblance to frontier America. For one of the books in this universe, he's teamed up with another local author to revive the old Ace Doubles-style book, with two novella-length works bound "back to back" in one volume.

He's currently working on a quite different novel, Ten Gentle Opportunities, that combines fantasy, SF, and humor in some surprising ways. Among other things, it features--I am not making this up--zombies doing the Macarena.

Read more from Jeff on his Web site and blog.

Maybe it's time to revive this old idea

http://www.duntemann.com/charvolant.jpg

Bookstores will actually be anxious to have these things in the basement or in the back room, simply to reduce the costs of carrying inventory. What we'll see over time is a sort of "replenish on demand" bookstore, in which single copies of books are present on the shelves for customers to flip through and purchase--and when that single copy is sold, the cash registers will send an order downstairs to start manufacturing another. Periodically, the newly-printed copies will be carried back upstairs and reshelved for the next customer to find.

What a system like this obviates is the need to manage warehouses full of fragile inventory (which one fire or flood can render worthless) and truck it around, often across hundreds or thousands of miles. A publisher will send repro files (at this stage in history, print PDFs) to the retailer's servers, from which the book machines can draw. The retailer will then pay the publisher for each copy printed. No returns, no warehouses. Bookstores limit their risk to a single copy of each title shelved, rather than hundreds or thousands as is now the case. Publishers limit their risk to content creation costs (acquisition, editing, and layout, plus promotion) and do not have to deal with the patholigical accounting caused by retailer returns.

Most modern book retailing is done by two large chains and a few small ones, plus debris. The larger chains have more than enough money to buy these machines and implement the systems, though it will take some time. Needless to say, Amazon will be hot to implement such a system as well.

I blogged about this back in October. See http://www.duntemann.com/october2006.htm#10-16-200 6

BTW, machines like this have existed for some time, and it's a little unclear to me why Espresso is special. The real idea here is putting them in libraries to print out take-home-and-keep copies of out-of-copyright books, and that may be less compelling than many people think. Mostly it makes it faster to get your own copy of Moby Dick than ordering one online.

On the other hand, if the libraries ever decide to cut deals with publishers and sell first-run titles at steep discounts, well, that would change book retailing utterly, and incite a war unlike any bookselling has ever seen.

Damn straight. I used this book:

http://www.duntemann.com/assembly.htm

...make it seem like he reads mostly old Tom Swift books these days.

Is Jeff Duntemann's Assembly Language Step by Step, I have the original edition from 92' and it appears there's been a revised edition that covers some Linux. Whats nice is that he has always taken the approach that it is your first language to learn, and he does a great job of laying it all out in very layman type terms. I still have that book and it will be one that I always keep around.

I'm more Christian than chemist, I'm afraid, but I'd thought that Miller's experiments were among the easier targets for creationists to dismiss. While Miller's experiments may yet offer clues for life's origin, later research demonstrates without question that the origin problem is much more complex than pop scientists like Sagan seemed to believe.

If life is that common, where is everybody?

Used Warchalk symbols

Is this because people them erasing them as fast as they are put down, or is it because companies have become aware of the open-ness of there wi-fi networks and closed the security on them. Needless to say i've seen hardly any symbols around london or manchester (UK) in the past month or so. I personally just used them to grab email, as usually my cellphone would lose signal too often in the city to be worth trying to grab large amounts of mail.

I don't see any mention of IA-64 or Unix/Linux ...

If you are looking for a assembly book that is fun to read and goes into Linux details try: "Assembly Language Step by Step"