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F atbrain.com has it for $31.95 in stock.

Bookpool. com has it for $24.50, on backorder. It cost me $9 for 2 day fedex and got it the next day for the first edition.

Now, as James Lawson puts it on the CCl4 web site, the ANSI board is all but dead. Most boards have been surpassed by the Internet and indeed FTP sites and websites as you rightly state; Fido feeds have been surpassed by Usenet; message areas by maillists. It's back to information provision and suchlike.

There has been, for some years now, a Viewdata Revival going on, which puts forward many of the arguments. Unfortunately the website is a bit stale but it does give you a sort-of hail back to the days of CARBBS, XFS+ and EBBS board hosts running on 32k BBC Micros with (if you were lucky) 20Mb Winchester hard disks - none of this 24Gb filespace and 18 CDs online rubbish.

There are several Viewdata bulletin boards now online on the Internet, run from Acorn Archimedes machines using Gareth Babb's excellent VHost software. Mine is called Haven and you can get to it without even a Viewdata emulator, by using the online Java-based client. Alternatively there are bits of software you can use to access them.

Of course, there are still ANSI boards available via telnet - the UserFriendly one immediately springs to mind. But you still won't get back the sort of thing which you had with Viewdata.

Hope this enlightens at least some ;)

Joel.

If science fiction is fiction about science, would Connie Willis' book Bellwether
count as science fiction? It is a very funny novel about the chaos (pun intended) of performing science in a business environment, but I do not think I can call it science fiction.

Simon Singh, Fermat's Enigma : The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem. Based on the (excellent) BBC/PBS television show (it was a Nova episode). Highly recommended.

Get it h ere at Fatbrain (does /. get a cut that way?), or here at Amazon.com.

Check out this column which intuitively explains why FTL communication in any form violates causality.

-- GWF

Of possible to interest to some readers, my latest Brain Candy column at Fatbrain.com is about Einstein's special theory of relativity and how it implies that any faster than light communication implies the ability to send messages backwards in time.

Of course, this yields all sorts of ugly paradoxes, which is why most physicist consider FTL communication unrealizable.

-- GWF

Of possible to interest to some readers, my latest Brain Candy column at Fatbrain.com is about Einstein's special theory of relativity and how it implies that any faster than light communication implies the ability to send messages backwards in time.

Of course, this yields all sorts of ugly paradoxes, which is why most physicist consider FTL communication unrealizable.

-- GWF

For those interested in millenialism and the millenium controversy, PBS had an interesting NewsHour interview with Stephen Jay Gould about two years ago. The interview discusses topics from his then-recent book, Questioning the Millennium, which has just been reissued. Here are links to it at Amazon and f atbrain.

You're grabbing medical records from unsecure places (like doctors offices and homes)? They'll have their password written on a post-it next to the monitor, trust me.
Some type of token based key is probably the best bet.

To cement the argument...all the way back to Firewalls and Internet Security : Repelling the Wily Hacker , username / password security has been noted to be insecure. It's *convenient,* but convenience has no place in a secure network unless you're spending big money on, say, smart cards or token based security. Or biometrics.

Just another .02.

This whole lawsuit just made my mind up that I won't ever use Amazon.com again. Maybe we should all start showing we care by voting with our pocketbooks- next time you are going to buy a book try fatbrain.com or some other competetor.

Now I know Amazon.com isn't the only company to engage in this type of practice (laughable lawsuits which go against any principle of a free and open web), but they seem to do an outstanding job of it.

It is this type of thing that exemplifies the trend of turning a great technology into a cash cow for a few mis-guided CEO's who didn't use the web until the mid 90's.

For those who want some background on the important issues, I highly recommend Gregory Pfister's book In Search of Clusters . Clustering is a lot harder than most people realize, and people should not ignore the work that's been done before in this area. The important question for LCC is what is fundamentally new in their design. I doubt that the lack of kernel locks is really it.

The thing that remains to be seen is what set of applications they target, and what tradeoffs they make to support those applications. The fundamental issues in clustering have been addressed by a large number of research projects and products, and I'd like to know what's new about LCC.

That being said, I'm happy that some smart people are going after this problem!

While it's not an O'Reilly book, I found a pretty good book on GTK+ published by New Riders called Developing Linux Applications with GTK+ and GDK written by Eric Harlow. I read it without having written a GUI program before and I understood it well. It lacks detailed explanations of every widget, but the online www.gtk.org documentation takes care of that for me. Here's a link to it on fatbrain.com.

Fatbrain.com has recently announced that it will offer an electronic publishing service, E-matter. What do you think about offering documents for download for a fee? Is this something that O'Reilly might be undertaking in the future?

if you submit a book between now and october 15th, you get 100% royalties through jan 1, 2000. if you submit aftward october 15th, you get 50%.

(more info at http://www1.fatbrain.com/ema tter/details_royalties.asp.

• Royalty -- in exchange for publication rights, the publisher prints and sells the book, and gives you royalties if the book is successful; you pay the publisher nothing.
• Vanity -- you pay the publisher to print and bind your book; the printed books are your property, and you have to sell them.
• Subsidy -- a combination of the above two; you pay the publisher some money up front, and they print the book, sell it, and pay royalties.
• Self -- you form your own little publishing company, choosing your book's graphic design, hiring a printer, etc., etc.

For more details, see SFWA's excellent page on subsidy and vanity publishers.

Fatbrain's program doesn't seem as bad as some of the outfits described on SFWA's site. But this program looks like a way to separate foolish writers from their money. As such, it's likely to be a smashing success. I can imagine thousands of people writing what they imagine to be the Great American Novel, uploading it to Fatbrain, fantasizing about the fame and fortune that awaits them, and not missing the leak from their credit cards.

But read the fine print: After the promotional period, Fatbrain takes $12/year/book from your credit card, and half of your book's download price -- in exchange for what labor or risk? The company doesn't promise to do anything to promote your book. It doesn't even promise a quality-of-service level for its download site!

So why should anyone interested in self-publishing go through Fatbrain, rather than setting up an ecommerce site through a regular ISP?

from the faq at http://www1.fatbrain.com/ematt er/support/faq_027.asp:

In most cases, you know if you own the copyrights to content that you created. But, if you created something while working for a company, you're not quite sure if you retain the copyrights of a particular piece of work or if you are interested in officially registering your work, we recommend that you visit the American Bar Association (ABA) web site and explore their copyrights information.

The article states: "What we have here is some alien life because it has nothing to do with biochemical life."

If that's true, then Erwin is just a lucky geek reincarnated on Linux ;-)

In late July 1999, Genetic Programming Inc. started operating a new 1,000-node Beowulf-style parallel cluster computer consisting of 1,000 Pentium II 350 MHz processors and a host computer

In short, this is nothing new, research of this kind has been going on for a while, and all of them, I'm sure, came up with some new and interesting observations.

There are two explenations for why cnn noticed it and is presenting it as some kind of a breakthru:

a. (creationist) The Hand of Microsoft touched it.

b. (darwinian) a couple of researchers have evolved slightly better marketing skills than their colleagues

The whole debate about this being real life or not, real evolution or not etc. is kind of besides the point. If you write a program that evolves into something that plays tic-tac-toe, the result is interesting in itself, no need to make it behave like real life bacteria or whatever, anymore than there is to make a plane with flapping wings. That's why trying to find similarities with real life organisms is probably only interesting to biologists (as a plane with flapping wings would be). Quantitative mathematical formulas? Programming with equations sucks.

The tricky part of genetic programming is coming up with a programming language that would maximize the probability of meaningful mutations. If you were to assign a number to every element of a programming language, an array with 1k cells could contain an x^1000 possible programs, where x is the number of elements (plus variable identifiers, digits of a numbering system etc.).

Obviously if you did it in Visual C++, only a very small percentage of those programs would produce meaningful output, in Windows, most programs would crash the system, but then, that's a good thing.

If I was doing my taxes on Excell, I'd much rather the whole thing crash than start evolving.

ps. The best thing I learned back when I was doing some genetic programming was that sex is an unnecessary and inefficient way of creating good code :)

For further reading, check out Terence McKenna's Food of the Gods, in which he theorizes that humans are apes that had to adapt to grasslands as the Sahara receded, and they began introducing psychedelic mushrooms into their diets that were growing on cow sh*t in those grasslands. Monkeys that had better cognitive abilities, robust egos, and imaginations could deal with it, others could not. Natural selection for more finely tuned brains. Also, I highly suggest reading Ishmael, by Daniel Quinn. Telepathic gorilla tells man why he's so f*cked up. And The Third Chimpanzee by Jared Diamond, gives a great understanding of how human language evolved. -- octo

Speaking of Applied Crypto, I recently bought the revised edition of that myself, and was postively floored by the number of reviews [at amazon], as well as the quality of those reviews. There are a few "Great!" comments, but many of them focus on what's lacking from this tome... in detail.

Contrast that with the one user-review at Fatbrain which states simply that the book is pretty amazing.

Now, regarding user comments and such, as a science author I find Fatbrain's website to be vastly superior to Amazon's. For example, I submitted information about my book's website in August of 1998 to both Fatbrain and Amazon. It appeared at Amazon's page for my book in April of 1999 --- a mere 8 month delay. On the other hand, Fatbrain built a rather elaborate page for my book before the book even hit the stores. (To be clear, I only started writing for Fatbrain about two months ago, so this has nothing to do we them giving special treatment---they didn't even know me at the time.)

That said, if you are looking for a Stephen King book, then definitely go to Amazon; but if you are looking for scientific and technical books, it makes sense (at least to me) to shop at a place where they specialize in geek books, seek out authors to improve their website (with original content, author recommendations, etc.) and put a great deal of effort into building an informative website that contains user review, excerpts, and author information, not just for Oprah's book club authors, but for science and technical authors that are regularly ignored by Amazon.com.

Now, regarding user comments and such, as a science author I find Fatbrain's website to be vastly superior to Amazon's. For example, I submitted information about my book's website in August of 1998 to both Fatbrain and Amazon. It appeared at Amazon's page for my book in April of 1999 --- a mere 8 month delay. On the other hand, Fatbrain built a rather elaborate page for my book before the book even hit the stores. (To be clear, I only started writing for Fatbrain about two months ago, so this has nothing to do we them giving special treatment---they didn't even know me at the time.)

That said, if you are looking for a Stephen King book, then definitely go to Amazon; but if you are looking for scientific and technical books, it makes sense (at least to me) to shop at a place where they specialize in geek books, seek out authors to improve their website (with original content, author recommendations, etc.) and put a great deal of effort into building an informative website that contains user review, excerpts, and author information, not just for Oprah's book club authors, but for science and technical authors that are regularly ignored by Amazon.com.

I'm *sure* (* denotes heavy sarcasm) all the /. peeps just *love* Fatbrain for their partnership with Microsoft...

You TOTALLY miss the coolest thing Amazon offers which is their excellent Advantage program for independent musicians and authors and publishers and now even for independent film and video makers

That a total unknown artist (who doesn't have a prayer of getting her product in a book, music, or video store without a serious distribution relationship) can sell their art on Amazon in my eyes makes Amazon one of the best ecommerce companies out there!

Fatbrain!