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I knew this post would elicit a comment like this, so much obliged. (First, a minor quibble - I think you mean "vegetarians", rather than "vegans." The latter not only don't eat meat, but any animal byproduct, eg. dairy.)

As you implicitly acknowledge, there are a lot of different types of vegetarians and vegans, who have chosen to omit certain things from their diet for various reasons. A vegetarian who is one for health reasons won't be terribly interested in eating meat, regardless of it's origins.

There are other arguments for vegetarianism, of course. Sustainability is one (although this would imply more that we should eat far less meat, from animals raised in ways that are environmentally friendly and don't negatively impact our ability to produce other foods.) The level of cruelty involved in factory farming, which is required to sustain our voracious appetite for meat is another, but this has the same caveats. I've known organic farmers that take better care of their animals than some do their children.

The one that seems to cause meat eaters the biggest problem is ethics. Is it defensible that we take life away from other sentient creatures for our own pleasure simply because our sentience is more highly evolved? I became a vegetarian for health reasons, but after dissociating myself from a meat diet and no longer needing to justify it, this question become easier to contemplate. I cannot in good conscience cause pain and take away the life from another living creature when I don't need to for my own survival. I consider us fortunate that we have this option, that we do not need to cause harm to continue to exist.

(Douglas Hofstadter expounds on this quite eloquently:

At some point, in any case, my compassion for other “beings” led me very naturally to finding it unacceptable to destroy other sentient beings (or other hallucinations, if you prefer), such as cows and pigs and lambs and fish and chickens, in order to consume their flesh, even if I knew that their (hallucinated) sentience wasn't quite as high as the (hallucinated) sentience of human beings.

http://tal.forum2.org/hofstadter_interview

)

For myself, I am looking forward to the day when we find vat grown meat at our grocers, and fervently hope that one day this will supplant "naturally grown" meat. I believe that most vegetarians would agree, and not have a particular problem with people consuming non-sentient cell tissue.

As an aside, I was recently at a friend's place, and we were making caesar salad, hers with bacon, mine without. In the interest of science, I tasted a piece. It was the single most revolting flavour I've ever tasted, something like carrion. You do lose your taste for meat over time, and there are many vegetarians that really don't miss the nasty things you meat eaters put into your bodies ;)

A human life is superior to an animal's life.

Why?

Depends who you ask. I content we are because we are capable of intelligent thought and self-awareness. Douglas Hofstadter would tell you it's because we have a larger "soul" than animals (see this interview). More religious folk might tell you it's because God created us in his image and made the animals for our service.

It would be hard for one who has the moral conviction that human life is not superior to animal life to live a morally consistent life. How could they justify eating meat, that would be tantamount to eating a fellow human's flesh. How could they justify hitting an animal while driving, and continuing on their way. That would be equivalent to hitting and injuring or killing another person and just driving along on your way. How would they defend eating crops plowed by cows - that would be akin to slave labor. (Granted, that's not much of a concern in today's mechanized farms.)

So I ask you: why isn't a human's life superior to an animal's?

raptureofthenerds, a phrase I learned from this wonderful interview with Douglas Hofstadter

http://tal.forum2.org/hofstadter_interview

Scientist and inventor Ray Kurzweil presents a different take at immortality, a more physical one. Like you, Kurzweil views the soul as "software" that can be executed on different "hardware". He further believes that in a relatively short while, we will have electronic hardware which is the equivalent of the human brain (which you eloquently characterize as a "universal machine", capable as "executing" any "soul software"). Once such hardware is available, Kurzweil believes immortality would have been reached: by "downloading" our soul-software onto electronic brains ("Giant Electronic Brains"?), we will become immortals, able to create backups of our souls to be restored in case of disaster, and able to shift our physical location anywhere in the speed of a software download.

Do you share Kurzweil's view of hardware being able to execute human soul software within the foreseeable future? Do you agree with his view of this being the equivalent of immortality â" will the software running on the electronic brain be the same "I"?

I think Ray Kurzweil is terrified by his own mortality and deeply longs to avoid death. I understand this obsession of his and am even somehow touched by its ferocious intensity, but I think it badly distorts his vision. As I see it, Kurzweil's desperate hopes seriously cloud his scientific objectivity.

I think Kurzweil sees technology as progressing so deterministically fast (Moore's Law, etc.) that inevitably, within a few decades, hardware will be so fast and nanotechnology so advanced that things unbelievable to us now will be easily doable. A key element in this whole vision is that no one will need to understand the mind or brain in order to copy a particular human's mind with perfect accuracy, because trillions of tiny "nanobots" will swarm through the bloodstream in the human brain and will report back all the "wiring details" of that particular brain, which at that point constitute a very complex table of data that can be fed into a universal computer program that executes neuron-firings, and presto - that individual's mind has been reinstantiated in an electronic medium. (This vision is quite reminiscent of the scenario painted in my piece "A Conversation with Einstein's Brain" toward the end of The Mind's I, actually, with the only difference being that there is no computer processing anything - it's all done in the pages of a huge book, with a human being playing the role of the processor.)

Rather ironically, this vision totally bypasses the need for cognitive science or AI, because all one needs is the detailed wiring plan of a brain and then it's a piece of cake to copy the brain in other media. And thus, says Kurzweil, we will have achieved immortal souls that live on (and potentially forever) in superfast computational hardware - and Kurzweil sees this happening so soon that he is banking on his own brain being thus "uploaded" into superfast hardware and hence he expects (or at least he loudly proclaims that he expects) to become literally immortal - and not in the way Chopin is quasi-immortal, with just little shards of his soul remaining, but with his whole soul preserved forever.

Well, the problem is that a soul by itself would go crazy; it has to live in a vastly complex world, and it has to cohabit that world with many other souls, commingling with them just as we do here on earth. To be sure, Kurzweil sees those things as no problem, either - we'll have virtual worlds galore, "up there" in Cyberheaven, and of course there will be souls by the barrelful all running on the same hardware. And Kurzweil sees the new software souls as intermingling in all sorts of unanticipated and unimaginable ways.

Well, to me, this "glorious" new world would be the end of humanity as we know it. If such a vision co

Alright. I give. I thought maybe you didn't enjoy brand new ideas and terminology. It's easy to read Darwin now, it's not new anymore. But you're right, there's no metaphysics there. How about Hawking's "A Brief History of Time"? Maybe that's a better comparison. There are more abstract concepts, metaphysical choo-choo trains, outside observers (way way outside), colonies of 2-dimensional beings living on 2 dimensional planes, etc. How else do you describe the relativity of time and the shape of a hypercube? Is that hand waving too?

Guess we'll just have to disagree. :)

If you have not read it yet: The Cyberiad: Fables for the Cybernetic Age .

From the page/book: ".. There are legends, as you know, that speak of a race of paleface, who concocted robotkind out of a test tube, though anyone with a grain of sense knows this to be a foul lie... For in the Beginning there was naught but Formless Darkness, and in the Darkness, Magneticity, which moved the atoms, and whirling atom struck atom, and Current was thus created, and the First Light... from which the stars where kindled, and then the planets cooled, and in their cores the breath of Scared Statisicality gave rise to microscopic Protomechanoans, which begat Protermechanoids, which begat the Primitive Mechanisms. These could not yet calculate, nor scarcely put two and two together, but thanks to Evolution and Natural Subtraction they soon multiplied and produced Omnistats, which gave birth to the Servostat, the Missing Clink, and from it came our progenitor, Automatus Sapiens..."

CC.

You betcha. The man was remarkably prescient.
Next up, Shalmaneser(from Stand on Zanzibar), brought to you by Google.
IMHO, every geek, especially media/internet geeks, should read it.

For a good introduction to incompleteness of mathematical systems people should really check out Godel, Escher, Bach: An eternal golden braid.
This book basically describes Godel's incompleteness theorem in an entertaining way for a general audience.

Wisconsin's LaserMonks say they'll give you a doozy of a deal

Are these LaserMonks related to the Electric Monk by any chance?

A much better alternative is "Chess Around the House", played by Alan Turing and friends over 50 years ago. It was described in GEB and elsewhere.

The idea is simple: make a chess move, start running a (cyclic) track. Your opponent has to make a move before you return. The faster you run, the less time your opponent has. So unlike chessboxing, there's a real, meaningful connection between the two activities. It requires good stamina, chess skills, and some thinking ahead, too (if I sprint now, he'll have less time for this move, but I'll be very tired for the next run and he'll have more time then; etc.)

Very enjoyable!

About a decade ago PC Magazine got their first review of a Pentium MMX CPU before it was officially released, because HP (I think it was HP...) sent them a review unit. Only HP didn't tell them it was an MMX CPU; they have hoped the reviewer will be impressed by the unit's great performance (due to increased on-chip cache) without noticing it's an unreleased CPU model.

On the other hand, I review books, and sometimes I get copies from publishers for reviewing. Sadly, however, the review copies I get are never better written, better edited, or have better plots than the copies you could buy in a bookstore.

Note the very thin neck (about 3.5mm long) near the trip -- it keeps the body of the pen from visually obstructing the point where you're writing, which is very nice when sketching etc. The catch is that this neck is rather delicate, so if the pen falls tip-down on hard surface it is often irreparable bended. Most of my C4 pens have been thus broken before running out (which is not saying a lot, since they pack a lot of ink).

It comes in 10 ink colors, of which my favorite is black (very dark, perfectly consistent). The lines are thin and sharp, and the gel-based ink dries very quickly so there's no smearing. Writing takes virtually no pressure, as gravity alone already suffices to leave a clear and continuous line if you drag the pen across the paper. Coupled with the light plastic construction, this makes for relatively effortless writing. Both pressure and velocity affect line thinkness only mildly (e.g., it doesn't "leak" like the Pilot V5 when held at one spot), so you get very fine and uniform lines. This effectively deprives you of an extra degree of freedom, though I find the tradeoff worthwhile for most applications.

My main gripe is the grip. It is cheap hard plastic (see the closeup), and slip-on rubber grips feel very awkward on such a fine-tipped pen. I tried fitting a G-Tec C4 refill into some better-crafted pen body, but didn't find any good match. Also, the pen clip, made from the same hard plastic, is not very functional as it breaks off easily. The fine innards deserve a better package.

About US$2 a piece, refills available.

Note the very thin neck (about 3.5mm long) near the trip -- it keeps the body of the pen from visually obstructing the point where you're writing, which is very nice when sketching etc. The catch is that this neck is rather delicate, so if the pen falls tip-down on hard surface it is often irreparable bended. Most of my C4 pens have been thus broken before running out (which is not saying a lot, since they pack a lot of ink).

It comes in 10 ink colors, of which my favorite is black (very dark, perfectly consistent). The lines are thin and sharp, and the gel-based ink dries very quickly so there's no smearing. Writing takes virtually no pressure, as gravity alone already suffices to leave a clear and continuous line if you drag the pen across the paper. Coupled with the light plastic construction, this makes for relatively effortless writing. Both pressure and velocity affect line thinkness only mildly (e.g., it doesn't "leak" like the Pilot V5 when held at one spot), so you get very fine and uniform lines. This effectively deprives you of an extra degree of freedom, though I find the tradeoff worthwhile for most applications.

My main gripe is the grip. It is cheap hard plastic (see the closeup), and slip-on rubber grips feel very awkward on such a fine-tipped pen. I tried fitting a G-Tec C4 refill into some better-crafted pen body, but didn't find any good match. Also, the pen clip, made from the same hard plastic, is not very functional as it breaks off easily. The fine innards deserve a better package.

About US$2 a piece, refills available.

Like other said before me, if the point is teaching Java, there's no better book than Bruce Eckle's "Thinking in Java", which is available electronically from Eckle's website. (The 3rd edition is new, I haven't read it specifically. My opinion is based on previous editions.)

I suggest, however, focusing on OOP, rather than on Java. A programmer who groks the fundametal concepts of OOP will have a relatively simple time adapting to the specific tidbits of Java. For this purpose, the best teaching language is Eiffel, and the best book is Object-Oriented Software Construction by Bertrand Meyer.

and now, a few years later, I really cant remember which was which. Can't really remember your ethics class either, or is that not offered these days?

This controversy is no different from giant drug companies piling money into schools, beefing up their biotechnology programs etc, or Bush's 200 million USD campaign warchest. IMO, this is a *big* issue, and in the end dilutes the integrity, purpose and freedom of the university.

And at the University of Waterloo last year, administrators announced a $1.6 million donation from Microsoft. At the same time they announced they would change the curriculum to introduce Microsoft's C# programming language into the first-year programming course instead of the more popular and long-established C++ they were currently using.

What a coincidence.

Senators Feingold and McCain say that campaign financing contributes to the public's belief that the political system is corrupt. Same with universities. I'm not saying funding should be disallowed, however, it's one thing to pay for a new building, quite another to be dictating to the universities. This article sums it up pretty well. Scary when books like those by Philip K. Dick and newspapers like the Onion are our reality.

Less "hard" SF to consider - The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester, Nova by Samuel R. Delany. Maybe even Peter F. Hamilton (start with The Reality Dysfunction), if you liked Stephenson.

Less "hard" SF to consider - The Stars My Destination, by Alfred Bester, Nova by Samuel R. Delany. Maybe even Peter F. Hamilton (start with The Reality Dysfunction), if you liked Stephenson.

Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid . Good stuff. A thinking book.

The other is George Dyson's Darwin Among the Machines: The Evolution of Global Intelligence. Incredible history of communication and computing with a pretty cool argument abuot the possible future of computer intelligence. He doesn't follow the well-worn tracks of those who basically posit a Short-Circuit-esque Johnny5 for the future of computers, instead exploring the actual nature of intelligence and how it may emerge uniquely among computer networks. A presentation of the thesis is available at Edge.org.

You won't go wrong with these books.

Godel, Escher, Bach by D. R. Hofstadter was already mentioned here as an excellent introduction to cognitive research: no to the research itself, but rather to the motivations of the researchers. My review of the 20th anniversary edition was also published on Slashdot.

Darwin's Origin of Species is old, but not dated, and (due to different standards in scientific writing at the time?) it reads almost like a popular-science book.

Mathematics (a historian's view): try Fermat's Last Theorem by S. Singh or the older and less-known, but excellent, A History of Pi by Beckmann.

Artificial life research (introduction): Levy's Artificial Life. Somewhat related (but more on the AI side of things) is G. B. Dyson's Darwin Among the Machines.

Godel, Escher, Bach by D. R. Hofstadter was already mentioned here as an excellent introduction to cognitive research: no to the research itself, but rather to the motivations of the researchers. My review of the 20th anniversary edition was also published on Slashdot.

Darwin's Origin of Species is old, but not dated, and (due to different standards in scientific writing at the time?) it reads almost like a popular-science book.

Mathematics (a historian's view): try Fermat's Last Theorem by S. Singh or the older and less-known, but excellent, A History of Pi by Beckmann.

Artificial life research (introduction): Levy's Artificial Life. Somewhat related (but more on the AI side of things) is G. B. Dyson's Darwin Among the Machines.

Godel, Escher, Bach by D. R. Hofstadter was already mentioned here as an excellent introduction to cognitive research: no to the research itself, but rather to the motivations of the researchers. My review of the 20th anniversary edition was also published on Slashdot.

Darwin's Origin of Species is old, but not dated, and (due to different standards in scientific writing at the time?) it reads almost like a popular-science book.

Mathematics (a historian's view): try Fermat's Last Theorem by S. Singh or the older and less-known, but excellent, A History of Pi by Beckmann.

Artificial life research (introduction): Levy's Artificial Life. Somewhat related (but more on the AI side of things) is G. B. Dyson's Darwin Among the Machines.

Godel, Escher, Bach by D. R. Hofstadter was already mentioned here as an excellent introduction to cognitive research: no to the research itself, but rather to the motivations of the researchers. My review of the 20th anniversary edition was also published on Slashdot.

Darwin's Origin of Species is old, but not dated, and (due to different standards in scientific writing at the time?) it reads almost like a popular-science book.

Mathematics (a historian's view): try Fermat's Last Theorem by S. Singh or the older and less-known, but excellent, A History of Pi by Beckmann.

Artificial life research (introduction): Levy's Artificial Life. Somewhat related (but more on the AI side of things) is G. B. Dyson's Darwin Among the Machines.

Godel, Escher, Bach by D. R. Hofstadter was already mentioned here as an excellent introduction to cognitive research: no to the research itself, but rather to the motivations of the researchers. My review of the 20th anniversary edition was also published on Slashdot.

Darwin's Origin of Species is old, but not dated, and (due to different standards in scientific writing at the time?) it reads almost like a popular-science book.

Mathematics (a historian's view): try Fermat's Last Theorem by S. Singh or the older and less-known, but excellent, A History of Pi by Beckmann.

Artificial life research (introduction): Levy's Artificial Life. Somewhat related (but more on the AI side of things) is G. B. Dyson's Darwin Among the Machines.

Godel, Escher, Bach by D. R. Hofstadter was already mentioned here as an excellent introduction to cognitive research: no to the research itself, but rather to the motivations of the researchers. My review of the 20th anniversary edition was also published on Slashdot.

Darwin's Origin of Species is old, but not dated, and (due to different standards in scientific writing at the time?) it reads almost like a popular-science book.

Mathematics (a historian's view): try Fermat's Last Theorem by S. Singh or the older and less-known, but excellent, A History of Pi by Beckmann.

Artificial life research (introduction): Levy's Artificial Life. Somewhat related (but more on the AI side of things) is G. B. Dyson's Darwin Among the Machines.

A detailed review of Lewis's "Cosmic Trilogy" can be found here: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.

A detailed review of Lewis's "Cosmic Trilogy" can be found here: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.

A detailed review of Lewis's "Cosmic Trilogy" can be found here: Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength.

Here is 5 Volts, by Eran Tromer.

Music and Math are closely related, as anyone who's read Godel Escher Bach knows. Musical scores have themes that appear in many different variations such as canons (when a melody is offset in time) and fugues (more complicated than a fugue, read the book if you want to know).

I'm not acoustically talented, and I'm sure I couldn't recognize a fugue or a canon if I heard one, but I know that there is some music that I really like, and that sounds better made and more complete than others. I wouldn't find it hard to believe those songs have properties that a computer could pick out.

For example, have you ever listened to a song for the first time, and been able to anticipate what the next notes would be? I think on some level our brain recognizes patterns that we can't see conciously. With statistical analysis, a program could determine if more hit songs always follow a pattern or a specific pattern (easy to hum songs that get stuck in your head), or if more hit songs would break the melody and hit a note you weren't expecting (like those really mind-blowing high notes).

As a music lover, I would be thrilled if this application worked. It would really enhance websites that try to suggest other songs that you might like based on your favorite songs. In a lot of the music I like, the singer's voice gets deep and gravelly in parts. There could be bands that I hadn't considered listening to who match that profile, and a program like HSS coudl find them.

Are you kidding me? This book came out more than 7 years ago. Why is this a front-page topic on Slashdot? Why not spend the resources reviewing recent books that not everyone has read, instead of well-known books that came out years ago? It doesn't make sense. If I want to find out about an old book, I just check the reviews on Amazon. Slashdot does a disservice to itself and to its readers with such stale topics. What's next, a review of Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine? Yep, DEC sure was an interesting company.

Yeah, I love this book. What I find most amazing about it is that it was originally written in Polish, and somehow all that poetry still comes out amazing. The one you quoted goes on for another 7 verses, and each damn one rhymes. Although that's probably a much of a tribute to the translator as is is to Lem himself.

Translation is an interesting problem.

Douglas Hofstadter , of Goedel Escher Bach fame, wrote an entire book about the nuances of translation, using many, many translations of an obscure one stanza poem to illustrate his theme.

It is somewhat surprising how well translation of poems or other word play works, and even more surprising is how wildly differant translations can convey the same feel, and somehow capture the feel of the original work.

Of course, it isn't too hard to screw it up completely either.

While nearly everything Lem writes is worthy, the one I keep going back to is The Cyberiad (with obligatory Amazon pointer).

It is like an Odyssey (either Homer's or James Joyce's) for the cybernetic age.

I stumbled across this webpage a while back. It has a listing of book "in-jokes" - jokes designed to be caught by the people that read the book all the way through.

For example: In the Thomas and Finny CALCULUS book (we've all seen this one - big, blue, dangerous), it says: The index includes an entry for whales, pointing to pages 365 ff. These pages include no mention of whales (they deal with applications of integrals); but there are several graphs there that look remarkably like whales.

The Java Specification book includes index entires on page 788:
Fibonacci numbers, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34,55, 89, 144, 233, 377, 610
self-referential: index entries, 788
not, see Russell's paradox

I think the movie succeeded in doing what the book was meant to do - it sparks the imagination! What IS the world going to be like in 800,000 years? I can't even imagine the changes that will come in the next 50! ... Let's put aside our petty concerns for a minute and remember what an important time this is to the evolution of technology.

As regards technological evolution, I note that in Wells' original, it was the Morlock's love of machines and enslavement to the idea of "mechanical progress" that led them at last to cannibalism and moral degeneracy.

The film fails, as the Pal version did in the 1960s, by dropping the key theme of Well's book: the time traveller discovers the end result of class warfare. The proles won by letting the rich think they'd won because they enjoy a life of luxury, but instead they are just cattle being fattened.

Wells was a Fabian Socialist with a huge sense of irony and these influences informed all his work. But socialism and irony is apparently too dangerous for Hollywood. Instead, Pal's film changed it into a metaphor about nuclear warfare and survivalism, and Wells Jr changes it into a metaphor about the perils of leisure development. What a crock.

The Time Machine is here. The end-of-the-earth chapter, which seems to give Katz the willies, is a perfect little End-Of-Colonialism piece, very typical of the time. Hodgson's House on the Borderland , Night Land , and Stapledon's Last and First Men are more of the same, but with their own charms.

`I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been. It had committed suicide. It had set itself steadfastly towards comfort and ease, a balanced society with security and permanency as its watchword, it had attained its hopes -- to come to this at last. Once, life and property must have reached almost absolute safety. The rich had been assured of his wealth and comfort, the toiler assured of his life and work. No doubt in that perfect world there had been no unemployed problem, no social question left unsolved. And a great quiet had followed.

`It is a law of nature we overlook, that intellectual versatility is the compensation for change, danger, and trouble. An animal perfectly in harmony with its environment is a perfect mechanism. Nature never appeals to intelligence until habit and instinct are useless. There is no intelligence where there is no change and no need of change. Only those animals partake of intelligence that have to meet a huge variety of needs and dangers.

`So, as I see it, the Upper-world man had drifted towards his feeble prettiness, and the Under-world to mere mechanical industry. But that perfect state had lacked one thing even for mechanical perfection -- absolute permanency. Apparently as time went on, the feeding of the Under-world, however it was effected, had become disjointed. Mother Necessity, who had been staved off for a few thousand years, came back again, and she began below. The Under-world being in contact with machinery, which, however perfect, still needs some little thought outside habit, had probably retained perforce rather more initiative, if less of every other human character, than the Upper. And when other meat failed them, they turned to what old habit had hitherto forbidden.

Probably the best intro to the subject is Steven Levy's Aritifial Life: The Quest for a New Creation. Getting old, but still relevant.

You might be interested in my review of the cosmic trilogy.

This reminds me of the old SF book, The Black Cloud by Fred Hoyle, in which a black cloud (an "interplanetary" life form) voices his surprise, when reaching Earth, that intelligent life had evolved on a planet's surface.

- Tal Cohen (see my SF reviews page)

Two comments: Much like in the case of "2001", I believe "Solaris" the book, and "Solaris" the movie (Russia, 1972; the book itself was originally published in Polish, not Russian) go hand in hand. Only after reading the book and watching the movie do you get a better grasp of both. (Read the book first, though.)

It should be noted, though, that Lem himself mentioned more than once that he did not like the movie and disagreed with the Tarkovsky's (the director's) interpretation of the book.

Solaris is one of my two most favorite Lem books, the other one being The Cyberiad. In the discussion above, somebody already mentioned the issue of translation; it should be noted that Kandel's English version of The Cyberiad is a brilliant translation (I haven't read the original, but I did read a different translation).

A good deal of thought and research is going into how people translate ideas between languages. This would make one heck of an AI project and could prove very valuable to the web. As far as books on the subject go, I'm thinking of Le Ton Beau de Marot by Douglas Hofstadter.

Here are a few replies to comments posted to my review. Some of these comments I expected; some took me by surprise.

1. I strongly suspect that the reviewer never tried applying desing patterns, and I think the reviewer doesn't have much experience with low-level system programming:

I won't list my whole professional career here. You can find selected parts here. I'm not trying to boast; Slashdot would be the silliest place to do that, since I realize a great many of the readers had much more impressive careers than mine. But suffice to say that in my 14+ years as a programmer, I have programmed in C++ for well over 6 years. (You can find some of my C++ work in IBM's AlphaWorks site, for example). Is that experience enough for you? I also have some good experience with low-level systems programming (just for the record, I currently teach the OS Structure course in the Technion -- the "Israeli MIT"). I realize when and where manual deallocation is important -- but what most people seem not to realize is that in most cases, it isn't. Plain in simple: in most projects, it is better to leave the deallocation to the machine (see Meyer's OOSC2 for detailed arguments on this, better than anything I could present here).

As for working with patterns: The GoF book was published in '94. I stumbled upon it purely by mistake; and I was actively using patterns in my work by early '95. Further, part of my work was (and still is) design consultancy for large OO projects. Let's just say that I know a pattern when I see one; I know the need for a pattern when I see one; and I also know when a pattern is misused.

2. Singleton is _not_ just a misguided substitute for globals:

I know it isn't. What I meant to say is, in many cases, people use Singleton as a replacement for globals. Which is a bad design. I've seen too many cases where people thought that, rather than moving references around, they're better off creating a Singleton class, practically making the object a global that anyone may access. Of course this is not what Singletons are for; but this use does occur. Sorry if I wasn't clear enough on this point.

3. I found the reviewer's bias toward languages with built-in garbage collection a little annoying:

All "the reviewer" meant to say was that he found the book's bias towards langauges without GC a little annoying; especially in contrast with the original Design Patterns book, which had no such bias.

4. (Regarding delete this): If you're using it, your class shouldn't allow heap allocation:

Of course. But in Real Life(TM), it happens that one person writes a class (without stack allocation), and another modifies it -- not being aware of the "delete this" statement deep inside the class, he could add that feature. Or it could be added in a subclass, by someone who does not have access to the source of the original class and does not know it uses "delete this". And so on. Sure, you should comment your code well enough to prevent such unhappy accidents; but they will still happen. Trust me, I've seen them happen...

Maybe this is not the best source for code examples, but one commercial project where I've seen "delete this" used in a class, and a sub-class allowing stack allocation was... MFC (a rather old version, from mid-'95. It might have been changed since then; I haven't used MFC recently so I'm not up-to-date on the issue).

5. And who should not be developing patterns?:

Very good point. So perhaps I didn't make myself clear enough on this issue: the chapters are intended for those who mean to publish the patterns they come up with during their work. How to present it, how to document it, and so on. You'll agree that this is a much smaller crowd then all pattern-users in general.

-------

That's all, folks. I'll be happy to reply to any additional comments. While I didn't rank the book a perfect 10 (because it simply isn't a perfect book), I still think it is a good book, and I do recommend it for serious programmers.

Here are a few replies to comments posted to my review. Some of these comments I expected; some took me by surprise.

1. I strongly suspect that the reviewer never tried applying desing patterns, and I think the reviewer doesn't have much experience with low-level system programming:

I won't list my whole professional career here. You can find selected parts here. I'm not trying to boast; Slashdot would be the silliest place to do that, since I realize a great many of the readers had much more impressive careers than mine. But suffice to say that in my 14+ years as a programmer, I have programmed in C++ for well over 6 years. (You can find some of my C++ work in IBM's AlphaWorks site, for example). Is that experience enough for you? I also have some good experience with low-level systems programming (just for the record, I currently teach the OS Structure course in the Technion -- the "Israeli MIT"). I realize when and where manual deallocation is important -- but what most people seem not to realize is that in most cases, it isn't. Plain in simple: in most projects, it is better to leave the deallocation to the machine (see Meyer's OOSC2 for detailed arguments on this, better than anything I could present here).

As for working with patterns: The GoF book was published in '94. I stumbled upon it purely by mistake; and I was actively using patterns in my work by early '95. Further, part of my work was (and still is) design consultancy for large OO projects. Let's just say that I know a pattern when I see one; I know the need for a pattern when I see one; and I also know when a pattern is misused.

2. Singleton is _not_ just a misguided substitute for globals:

I know it isn't. What I meant to say is, in many cases, people use Singleton as a replacement for globals. Which is a bad design. I've seen too many cases where people thought that, rather than moving references around, they're better off creating a Singleton class, practically making the object a global that anyone may access. Of course this is not what Singletons are for; but this use does occur. Sorry if I wasn't clear enough on this point.

3. I found the reviewer's bias toward languages with built-in garbage collection a little annoying:

All "the reviewer" meant to say was that he found the book's bias towards langauges without GC a little annoying; especially in contrast with the original Design Patterns book, which had no such bias.

4. (Regarding delete this): If you're using it, your class shouldn't allow heap allocation:

Of course. But in Real Life(TM), it happens that one person writes a class (without stack allocation), and another modifies it -- not being aware of the "delete this" statement deep inside the class, he could add that feature. Or it could be added in a subclass, by someone who does not have access to the source of the original class and does not know it uses "delete this". And so on. Sure, you should comment your code well enough to prevent such unhappy accidents; but they will still happen. Trust me, I've seen them happen...

Maybe this is not the best source for code examples, but one commercial project where I've seen "delete this" used in a class, and a sub-class allowing stack allocation was... MFC (a rather old version, from mid-'95. It might have been changed since then; I haven't used MFC recently so I'm not up-to-date on the issue).

5. And who should not be developing patterns?:

Very good point. So perhaps I didn't make myself clear enough on this issue: the chapters are intended for those who mean to publish the patterns they come up with during their work. How to present it, how to document it, and so on. You'll agree that this is a much smaller crowd then all pattern-users in general.

-------

That's all, folks. I'll be happy to reply to any additional comments. While I didn't rank the book a perfect 10 (because it simply isn't a perfect book), I still think it is a good book, and I do recommend it for serious programmers.

Here are a few replies to comments posted to my review. Some of these comments I expected; some took me by surprise.

1. I strongly suspect that the reviewer never tried applying desing patterns, and I think the reviewer doesn't have much experience with low-level system programming:

I won't list my whole professional career here. You can find selected parts here. I'm not trying to boast; Slashdot would be the silliest place to do that, since I realize a great many of the readers had much more impressive careers than mine. But suffice to say that in my 14+ years as a programmer, I have programmed in C++ for well over 6 years. (You can find some of my C++ work in IBM's AlphaWorks site, for example). Is that experience enough for you? I also have some good experience with low-level systems programming (just for the record, I currently teach the OS Structure course in the Technion -- the "Israeli MIT"). I realize when and where manual deallocation is important -- but what most people seem not to realize is that in most cases, it isn't. Plain in simple: in most projects, it is better to leave the deallocation to the machine (see Meyer's OOSC2 for detailed arguments on this, better than anything I could present here).

As for working with patterns: The GoF book was published in '94. I stumbled upon it purely by mistake; and I was actively using patterns in my work by early '95. Further, part of my work was (and still is) design consultancy for large OO projects. Let's just say that I know a pattern when I see one; I know the need for a pattern when I see one; and I also know when a pattern is misused.

2. Singleton is _not_ just a misguided substitute for globals:

I know it isn't. What I meant to say is, in many cases, people use Singleton as a replacement for globals. Which is a bad design. I've seen too many cases where people thought that, rather than moving references around, they're better off creating a Singleton class, practically making the object a global that anyone may access. Of course this is not what Singletons are for; but this use does occur. Sorry if I wasn't clear enough on this point.

3. I found the reviewer's bias toward languages with built-in garbage collection a little annoying:

All "the reviewer" meant to say was that he found the book's bias towards langauges without GC a little annoying; especially in contrast with the original Design Patterns book, which had no such bias.

4. (Regarding delete this): If you're using it, your class shouldn't allow heap allocation:

Of course. But in Real Life(TM), it happens that one person writes a class (without stack allocation), and another modifies it -- not being aware of the "delete this" statement deep inside the class, he could add that feature. Or it could be added in a subclass, by someone who does not have access to the source of the original class and does not know it uses "delete this". And so on. Sure, you should comment your code well enough to prevent such unhappy accidents; but they will still happen. Trust me, I've seen them happen...

Maybe this is not the best source for code examples, but one commercial project where I've seen "delete this" used in a class, and a sub-class allowing stack allocation was... MFC (a rather old version, from mid-'95. It might have been changed since then; I haven't used MFC recently so I'm not up-to-date on the issue).

5. And who should not be developing patterns?:

Very good point. So perhaps I didn't make myself clear enough on this issue: the chapters are intended for those who mean to publish the patterns they come up with during their work. How to present it, how to document it, and so on. You'll agree that this is a much smaller crowd then all pattern-users in general.

-------

That's all, folks. I'll be happy to reply to any additional comments. While I didn't rank the book a perfect 10 (because it simply isn't a perfect book), I still think it is a good book, and I do recommend it for serious programmers.

Mainly classics; by date of publication. Not all are fit for 13-years old people.

The links are to detailed reviews of the linked books.

• Frankenstein / Shelley
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea / Verne
• The War of the Worlds / Wells
• Brave New World / Huxley
• 1984 / Orwell
• I, Robot / Asimov
• The Martian Chronicles / Bradbury
• Foundation trilogy / Asimov
• The Illustrated Man / Bradbury
• City / Simak
• Fahrenheit 451 / Bradbury
• Childhood's End / Clarke
• The Caves of Steel / Asimov
• The Stars My Destination / Bester
• Have Space Suit - Will Travel / Heinlein
• A Canticle of Leibowitz / Miller
• Stranger in a Strange Land / Heinlein
• Dune / Herbert
• Dangerous Visions / Ellison
• Stand on Zanzibar / Brunner
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep / Dick
• 2001 / Clarke
• The Left Hand of Darkness / Le Guin
• Solaris / Lem
• Ringworld / Niven
• The Gods Themselves / Asimov
• The Dispossesed / Le Guin
• The Mote in God's Eye / Neven & Pournelle
• The Cyberiad / Lem
• The Best of Henry Kuttner / Kuttner
• Neuromancer / Gibson
• Ender's Game / Card

Mainly classics; by date of publication. Not all are fit for 13-years old people.

The links are to detailed reviews of the linked books.

• Frankenstein / Shelley
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea / Verne
• The War of the Worlds / Wells
• Brave New World / Huxley
• 1984 / Orwell
• I, Robot / Asimov
• The Martian Chronicles / Bradbury
• Foundation trilogy / Asimov
• The Illustrated Man / Bradbury
• City / Simak
• Fahrenheit 451 / Bradbury
• Childhood's End / Clarke
• The Caves of Steel / Asimov
• The Stars My Destination / Bester
• Have Space Suit - Will Travel / Heinlein
• A Canticle of Leibowitz / Miller
• Stranger in a Strange Land / Heinlein
• Dune / Herbert
• Dangerous Visions / Ellison
• Stand on Zanzibar / Brunner
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep / Dick
• 2001 / Clarke
• The Left Hand of Darkness / Le Guin
• Solaris / Lem
• Ringworld / Niven
• The Gods Themselves / Asimov
• The Dispossesed / Le Guin
• The Mote in God's Eye / Neven & Pournelle
• The Cyberiad / Lem
• The Best of Henry Kuttner / Kuttner
• Neuromancer / Gibson
• Ender's Game / Card

Mainly classics; by date of publication. Not all are fit for 13-years old people.

The links are to detailed reviews of the linked books.

• Frankenstein / Shelley
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea / Verne
• The War of the Worlds / Wells
• Brave New World / Huxley
• 1984 / Orwell
• I, Robot / Asimov
• The Martian Chronicles / Bradbury
• Foundation trilogy / Asimov
• The Illustrated Man / Bradbury
• City / Simak
• Fahrenheit 451 / Bradbury
• Childhood's End / Clarke
• The Caves of Steel / Asimov
• The Stars My Destination / Bester
• Have Space Suit - Will Travel / Heinlein
• A Canticle of Leibowitz / Miller
• Stranger in a Strange Land / Heinlein
• Dune / Herbert
• Dangerous Visions / Ellison
• Stand on Zanzibar / Brunner
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep / Dick
• 2001 / Clarke
• The Left Hand of Darkness / Le Guin
• Solaris / Lem
• Ringworld / Niven
• The Gods Themselves / Asimov
• The Dispossesed / Le Guin
• The Mote in God's Eye / Neven & Pournelle
• The Cyberiad / Lem
• The Best of Henry Kuttner / Kuttner
• Neuromancer / Gibson
• Ender's Game / Card

Mainly classics; by date of publication. Not all are fit for 13-years old people.

The links are to detailed reviews of the linked books.

• Frankenstein / Shelley
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea / Verne
• The War of the Worlds / Wells
• Brave New World / Huxley
• 1984 / Orwell
• I, Robot / Asimov
• The Martian Chronicles / Bradbury
• Foundation trilogy / Asimov
• The Illustrated Man / Bradbury
• City / Simak
• Fahrenheit 451 / Bradbury
• Childhood's End / Clarke
• The Caves of Steel / Asimov
• The Stars My Destination / Bester
• Have Space Suit - Will Travel / Heinlein
• A Canticle of Leibowitz / Miller
• Stranger in a Strange Land / Heinlein
• Dune / Herbert
• Dangerous Visions / Ellison
• Stand on Zanzibar / Brunner
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep / Dick
• 2001 / Clarke
• The Left Hand of Darkness / Le Guin
• Solaris / Lem
• Ringworld / Niven
• The Gods Themselves / Asimov
• The Dispossesed / Le Guin
• The Mote in God's Eye / Neven & Pournelle
• The Cyberiad / Lem
• The Best of Henry Kuttner / Kuttner
• Neuromancer / Gibson
• Ender's Game / Card

Mainly classics; by date of publication. Not all are fit for 13-years old people.

The links are to detailed reviews of the linked books.

• Frankenstein / Shelley
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea / Verne
• The War of the Worlds / Wells
• Brave New World / Huxley
• 1984 / Orwell
• I, Robot / Asimov
• The Martian Chronicles / Bradbury
• Foundation trilogy / Asimov
• The Illustrated Man / Bradbury
• City / Simak
• Fahrenheit 451 / Bradbury
• Childhood's End / Clarke
• The Caves of Steel / Asimov
• The Stars My Destination / Bester
• Have Space Suit - Will Travel / Heinlein
• A Canticle of Leibowitz / Miller
• Stranger in a Strange Land / Heinlein
• Dune / Herbert
• Dangerous Visions / Ellison
• Stand on Zanzibar / Brunner
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep / Dick
• 2001 / Clarke
• The Left Hand of Darkness / Le Guin
• Solaris / Lem
• Ringworld / Niven
• The Gods Themselves / Asimov
• The Dispossesed / Le Guin
• The Mote in God's Eye / Neven & Pournelle
• The Cyberiad / Lem
• The Best of Henry Kuttner / Kuttner
• Neuromancer / Gibson
• Ender's Game / Card

Mainly classics; by date of publication. Not all are fit for 13-years old people.

The links are to detailed reviews of the linked books.

• Frankenstein / Shelley
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea / Verne
• The War of the Worlds / Wells
• Brave New World / Huxley
• 1984 / Orwell
• I, Robot / Asimov
• The Martian Chronicles / Bradbury
• Foundation trilogy / Asimov
• The Illustrated Man / Bradbury
• City / Simak
• Fahrenheit 451 / Bradbury
• Childhood's End / Clarke
• The Caves of Steel / Asimov
• The Stars My Destination / Bester
• Have Space Suit - Will Travel / Heinlein
• A Canticle of Leibowitz / Miller
• Stranger in a Strange Land / Heinlein
• Dune / Herbert
• Dangerous Visions / Ellison
• Stand on Zanzibar / Brunner
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep / Dick
• 2001 / Clarke
• The Left Hand of Darkness / Le Guin
• Solaris / Lem
• Ringworld / Niven
• The Gods Themselves / Asimov
• The Dispossesed / Le Guin
• The Mote in God's Eye / Neven & Pournelle
• The Cyberiad / Lem
• The Best of Henry Kuttner / Kuttner
• Neuromancer / Gibson
• Ender's Game / Card

Mainly classics; by date of publication. Not all are fit for 13-years old people.

The links are to detailed reviews of the linked books.

• Frankenstein / Shelley
• 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea / Verne
• The War of the Worlds / Wells
• Brave New World / Huxley
• 1984 / Orwell
• I, Robot / Asimov
• The Martian Chronicles / Bradbury
• Foundation trilogy / Asimov
• The Illustrated Man / Bradbury
• City / Simak
• Fahrenheit 451 / Bradbury
• Childhood's End / Clarke
• The Caves of Steel / Asimov
• The Stars My Destination / Bester
• Have Space Suit - Will Travel / Heinlein
• A Canticle of Leibowitz / Miller
• Stranger in a Strange Land / Heinlein
• Dune / Herbert
• Dangerous Visions / Ellison
• Stand on Zanzibar / Brunner
• Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep / Dick
• 2001 / Clarke
• The Left Hand of Darkness / Le Guin
• Solaris / Lem
• Ringworld / Niven
• The Gods Themselves / Asimov
• The Dispossesed / Le Guin
• The Mote in God's Eye / Neven & Pournelle
• The Cyberiad / Lem
• The Best of Henry Kuttner / Kuttner
• Neuromancer / Gibson
• Ender's Game / Card

The book is divided into three parts: "Earth and the Overlords", "The Golden Age", and "The Last Generation". Each part presents a different theme, or discusses a different problem, and in fact each part could warrant a book of its own. The presence of all three themes, which are different in nature and quality, in one book makes it a strange mix that leaves an undecided flavor; and yet, all three themes are part of a single plot.

Okay, one actor is known -- Ender himself. But anyone cares to gamble/suggest actors for other roles? Peter, for example? Bean? Mazor?

Book reviews -- the original Ender's Quartet, and the newer Ender's Shadow.

- Tal