Slashdot Mirror

Small correction: His name is Eric Raymond, and he usually goes by Eric S. Raymond professionally.

The book can be found at isbn.nu or elsewhere, including from O'Reilly in case you're partial to them (since they don't show up in isbn.nu's list).

ESR's home page is a great resource unto itself.

Neutrino: Ghost Particle of the Atom By Isaac Asimov http://isbn.nu/0380004836

I said it before Intel did it, jackass. I'm not a fanboy, BTW. I'll buy Intel when it makes sense. I just prefer AMD after about two decades of experience buying products of both companies.

The 486 had a DRAM controller on its die? I'm going to have to ask for a citation. I think you're thinking of either the on-die L1 cache or the MMU (memory management unit), neither of which is a system main memory controller. Here's a citation to the counter: List of Intel Chipsets at Wikipedia. See how the chipset determines the memory specs up until the Core i Series, including the 80486? Here's another: List of Intel Chipsets at World IQ. Here's another: Intel CPU and Chipset History at Overclock 3D courtesy of a forum post there by "PV5150".

An MMU has nothing to do with controlling the actual SIPPs, SIMMs, or DIMMs. It's a multiprocessing ("multiprocessing" doesn't mean "multi-core") feature that allows the processor to enforce memory address range protection so that program A doesn't stomp on program B's memory range. That's a separate concern from getting data into and out of the processor from main memory.

Why don't you go get a copy of something like Upgrading and Repairing PCs and inform yourself? Here's the ISBN.nu link for the 18th edition in case you're a bargain shopper: 18th edition. I have the fifth edition myself. I might get an updated version for the handy reference tables in the back featuring things like POST codes and error codes for SCSI controllers.

BTW, have you ever actually built a PC older than, say, a Pentium 4? Or owned one?

He [Ford] relies on his thug, Harry Bennett, to enforce shop floor discipline with--that one historian compared to a totalitarian state. And so, in many ways, Fordlandia is Ford's attempt to recapture a lost innocence or this mantle of being history's redeemer. Ford revolutionizes capitalism, but then he spends most of the rest of his life trying to put the genie back into the bottle. In some ways, he's the--you could think of him as the sorcerer's apprentice. He attempts any number of experiments at social reform in the United States. He sets up these small, what he calls, village industries in northern Michigan that tries to balance agriculture and industry. Now, these were no match to the raw power of industrial capitalism. And he increasingly becomes idiosyncratic and quirky in his social vision. And Fordlandia, in many ways, is a kind of terminus of a lifetime of quite idiosyncratic ideas of how to organize society.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And he was into not only controlling the workers on the shop floor, but also their lives in general.

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And he conducted--he had his employees surveiled, watched what they were doing, how they were enjoying themselves. And did he carry that over into Brazil, as well?

GREG GRANDIN: Yeah, it was a combination of intense paternalism and intense surveillance, with the surveillance half increasing as the paternalist part fails in the United States.

In Brazil, it was a program of social regulation. He exported Prohibition. He didn't like drinking, even though it wasn't a Brazilian law. Or he tried to regulate the diet of Brazilian workers. He had very--you know, he had them eat--he was a health food nut, so he had them eating whole rice and whole wheat bread and canned Michigan peaches and oatmeal. He also tried to regulate their recreational time.

Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape by Brian Hayes

http://isbn.nu/9780134701882

Long answer is you and your team need to understand that you are administering and not leading or managing the project.
Short answer is learn how to manipulate and use people.

I highly recommend Apocalypse 2012: An Optimist Investigates The End of Civilization. The author, a science journalist, goes through a number of end-of-times scenarios. The difference between this book and many others is that he actually visits Scientists in the field, and travels to the relevant spots - from Guatemala to Russia. The prose is very interesting, and even though he rants far off the rails later in the book in the section on Armageddon (which is, as he writes, the most disappointing of all possible end-of-times scenarios, because it would be entirely of our making), it's still a very good read.

• Peopleware
• Collaborative Web Development

Both excellent books for this situation, in my opinion.

• Peopleware
• Collaborative Web Development

Both excellent books for this situation, in my opinion.

I found Electronic Components: A Complete Reference for Project Builders quite helpful in understanding what is going on. But I haven't compared it against other books.

http://www.isbn.nu/9780830633333

IANAEE (electrical engineer) and I've never built my own CPU, even from TTLs or in a simulator. It makes sense to me, though, that while chips having the error in them may not be tied to specific clock frequencies that the chances of encountering the bug still could be.

If it's a race condition in hardware, there's a good chance it's clock-sensitive. The bug probably exists in the whole line, sure. It'll manifest more as the clock ticks are closer together, because the margin for error without triggering the reversal of steps is smaller. If it's a matter of the wrong signal being sometimes being asserted because the edge of a clock line transition was missed, it's logically going to happen more when the clock cycles are shorter.

A bug being in the whole line regardless of clock frequency and that bug becoming more of an issue at higher clock frequencies are not at all mutually exclusive conditions. The higher frequencies and higher rates of the error may not coincide, but there's nothing in the article to logically say they don't.

The erratum probably does apply to the whole line equally but probably manifests as a percentage of the time in use as some function of the frequency.

For any geek wanting a basic understanding of issues like latching times, gate propagation delays, and other analog electrical signaling issues inside a digital CPU, I recommend the first few chapters of Structured Computer Organization. The book builds upon basic designs of computers from using TTLs to designing a CPU, then up by layers through microcode, designing an assembly language, and more. I have an older edition at home which covers up through the 68030 and the 80386 as examples. The newer one covers up through the Pentium II, the UltraSparc, and the Java chips. The book won't make you an electrical engineer by any means, but the discussions of the tricky timing issues within even simple CPUs might be useful here.

As for the clock speed not effecting the percentage loss in efficiency due to the microcode fix... well, yeah. The microcode is the same across the line regardless of the clock speed. If you insert two identical strings of instructions A1 and A2 into an identical pair of microcode stores B1 and B2, the resulting patched microcodes C1 and C2 will likewise be identical. The faster processor will decode and execute the microcode at the same clock speed as before, and so will the slower one. They'll each have the same percentage slowdown relative to their own clock speeds, because they're running the same microcode. We're not talking about two different generations of processors or even two different revisions. It's the same processor design at two clock speeds. One is going to get the same nerfs and buffs for any microcode change proportional to their clock speeds as the other.

I've killed some time on this since it's a pretty interesting idea. It turns out there are plenty outside the D and F range. It does seem to like pages with a single Flash object and not much else, so that's bad. It also makes some pretty arbitrary decisions which don't mean squat to many sites. There are some sites that get enough traffic that speed is a factor but not so much that a content delivery network is really necessary, for example.

I skipped the actual link and score on sites that are pretty much just representative of the sites around them. I wanted to include them by name, though, to show where they fall. I've stuck mostly to main index pages, and I've noted where I've gone deeper.

A: Google (99%), Altavista main page (98%), Altavista Babelfish (90%) (including upon doing a translation from English to French), Craigslist (96%), Pricewatch (93%), Slackware Linux, OpenBSD, Led Zeppelin site at Atlantic (100%), supremecommander.com, w3m web browser site (96%)

B: Apache.org (87%), the lighttpd web server (84%), Google Maps, which also got a C once (84% in most cases), Perlmonks (84%), Dragonfly BSD (85%), Butthole Surfers band page (81%), 37 Signals

C: One Laptop Per Child,, ESR's homepage, the Open Source Initiative (78%), Google News (73%), Lucid CMS (74%), Perl.org (75%), lucasfilm.com, Charred Dirt game

D: gnu.org, The Register, A9 (66%), kernel.org, Akamai (64%), kuro5hin.org, freshmeat.net, linuxcd.org, Movable Type (61%), Postnuke, blogster.com, Joel on Software (67%), Fog Creek Software, metallica.com, gaspowered.com, Scorched 3D (68%), id software (64%), ISBN.nu book search

F: MS IIS (49%), microsoft.com, msn.com, linux.com, fsf.org, discovery.com, newegg.com, rackspace.com, the Simtel archive (26%), CNet Download (29%), Adobe (58%), savvis.com, mtv.com, sun.com, pclinuxos.com, freebsd.org, phpnuke.org, use.perl.org, ruby-lang.org, python.org, java.com, Rolling Stones band page (56%), powellsbooks.com, amazon.com, barnesandnoble.com, getfirefox.com

My site for my company (96%) gets an A (no, I'm not going to get it slashdotted) which is pretty simple but has a pic and some Javascript on it. Several sites I have done or have helped design with someone else get C or D ratings.

Check out the price comparison on ISBN.NU. They even let you compare shipping rates. Unfortunately, bookpool (mentioned by a sibling poster) doesn't appear to be listed (for this book at least).

The other day I was skimming through a book I very much enjoyed as a boy: Asimov on Astronomy.

Chapter 2 is about asteroids and comets that may impact the Earth, and how much damage they would do. He concludes with:

In the future, perhaps, things may be different. The men in the space stations that will eventually be set up about the Earth may find themselves, among other things, on the watch for the Earth-grazers, something like the iceberg watch conducted in northern waters since the sinking of the Titanic (but much more difficult of course).

The rocks, boulders, and mountains of space may be painstakingly tagged and numbered. Their changing orbits may be kept under steady watch. Then, a hundred years from now, perhaps, or a thousand, some computer on such a station will sound the alarm: "Collision orbit!"

Then a counterattack, kept in waiting for all that time would be set in motion. The dangerous rock would be met with an H-bomb (or, by that time, something more appropriate) designer to trigger off on collision. The rock would glow and vaporize and change from a boulder to a conglomeration of pebbles.

Even if they continued on course, the threat would be lifted. Earth would merely be treated to a spectacular (and harmless) shower of shooting stars.

Asimov was writing in 1966 but still should have known better. The kinetic energy of a shattered object is the same as the intact object. The only difference is that the energy will all be shed in the atmosphere instead of mostly in the lithosphere. Human suffering might be ameliorated somewhat but unless the trajectory of the pebbles is changed, the atmosphere is still getting superheated with disasterous local, and possibly global, effects. If you're standing under the shooting-star display, then like any nearby sand, you're getting cooked.

Yes, this ruined the ending of Deep Impact for me. Yes, I'm a geek.

It is as important to Windows, once running in GUI mode, as grub or lilo would be to Linux if it weren't cleared from memory once the kernel loaded.

Is this the official party line? Does Linux call any grub or lilo code after it's booted? No. Does Windows 9x call any DOS code after it's booted? Yes, all the time. Have you forgotten the investigation that Matt Pietrek and Andrew Shulman did?

Think Unix by Jon Lasser.
http://isbn.nu/078972376X

A number of posters have mentioned that college textbook pricing is generally ridiculous in a number of fields. One thing I haven't seen mentioned: has anyone wandered over to the selection of textbooks for business classes? I am not a business major and, fortunately, I have never had to buy one of these books. Most of these books are quite expensive, more than most tech books, I think. And what is in them? Marketing, mostly. The little bit of skimming through these books to see what justifies the price has shown me that many of them are (collections of) ads, thinly or thickly disguised. I would assume that, to get business professors to write these books, the publishers would have to pay a handsome sum. After all, if these business professors are any good at what they do, they are commanding a large salary from their universities plus making money continually on business opportunities, and it needs to be worth their time to write the books. It stands to reason that these writers would also see writing the books as a business opportunity to promote that with which they are affiliated. Publishers could hardly object (even if they wished) because it gets the books written. But what do the students actually learn from the books? Some tech books seem to fall into this vein as well, "advertising" a particular product or technology to the author's or publisher's benefit.

Another consideration for the price of tech books is that up-to-date university engineering libraries buy lots of them. The engineering library here has a huge selection of books and is very good about keeping the collection up to date. It's expensive, but they have the budget to be able to keep buying these books. Most (not all) of the technology books seem to be of some quality. $40-$60 for a book for this collection does not stop the library from procuring more.

Finally, for buying books, http://isbn.nu/ (a shopbot) might save some time in comparison.

AC: there has never ever been a movie that made a true profit

Red Flayer: Your post makes no sense, but I am interested in hearing what you have to say.

Believe these:

• Google: hollywood creative accounting
• Wikipedia: Hollywood accounting
• Hollywood Law CyberCenter: Less Than Zero
• Movie Money by Daniels, Leedy, and Sills (ISBN 1879505339)

Or use isbn.nu.

Ebay is your friend.

Also consider going with PICs, Basic Stamp, SitePlayer (a webserver on a chip), the BugBook books and hardware, 8085-based systems, or some other simplistic frameworks.

A year or so ago, I was lamenting how complicated (and unapproachable) systems had gotten, and a friend proved me wrong when he pointed toward some similar set of suggestions. There are a zillion interesting ways to learn practical/basic digital electronics now, rather than fewer. And the results can be delightfully cheap: simple atmel pic's sell for a buck or 2, can be programmed by some funny homebrew parallel/serial port interfaces that are equally cheap, etc.

And then there's USB, digital A/V, etc.

Depending on what aspect of pc design (memory, buffering, hardware I/O, signals/timing, computation, real-time circuits, homebrew SCADA, animatronic/smart toys, robotics, or whatever), you can either go retro using modern equivalents to old hardware or do enough to learn concepts and then fast-forward to the newer tools.

When you ask if people believe in "life on other planets", you'll get two camps (usually): 1.) The religious nutters who believe God created man once, and broke the mold, and 2.) Abductee nutters who believe aliens are living among us already.

All kidding aside... life exists elsewhere, its how WE came to exist HERE, in this time. It may not be bipedal, humanoid life, but its certainly life. Single-cellular organisms living at -400F on some distant planet is still life. Just because it isn't hovering around in a little saucer causing traffic jams in Mexico doesn't mean it doesn't exist.

Also.. even if there was intelligent, bipedal humanoid life elsewhere, why would they be interested in us?

Maybe they're just as prehistoric in their space travels as us. Maybe they're so far ahead of us that they see us like we see an anthill in Africa. Who knows..

We also seem to keep trying to find life in places "similar" to our own. Why is it impossible to believe that a planet billions of light years away from the Sun could house intelligent life? Maybe they don't seek us out, because "Nothing that close to the Sun could survive...", just like we don't believe life could exist so far out in the blackness away from the Sun.

Imagine what a society of cells, left to evolve undisturbed for 2 million years (WITHOUT any Ice Age to reboot the process), would evolve to... Imagine what our society could do in the next 2 million years (if we don't blow ourselves up first)

Carl Sagan, a brilliant astronomer, was also a devoutly religious person. He believed in life on other planets. There's even a great mathematical equation (Drake's Equation) that sums it up really well.

Lastly, for those who haven't READ it, grab a copy of "Contact: A Novel" by Sagan. Its quite different from the movie... and well worth the read for how in-depth it goes into the interesting paradox about Religion, Science, Extraterrestrial Life and many other issues. Its worth the few dollars to read, if you're interested in debating this topic from any angle.

In short, life DOES exist elsewhere... but are we prepared to find it? Are we prepared for it to find us?

Take a look at Physical Computing. It's sub-titled "Sensing and Controlling the Physical World with Computers" and features instructions and projects for basic work wiht sensors and simple chips like the PIC and BX-24. (Full disclosure: The authors are colleagues of mine at the Interactive Telecommunications Program at NYU.)

Red Mars
Green Mars
Blue Mars

And the John Varley Titan trilogy involves long life as well, though it's not really central. It's been a long time since I've read them, but as I recall, at one point the main character captures an enemy and pistol-whips him -- using the barrel of the gun, because, as the author remarks, you don't get to be 200 years old by doing stupid things like pointing a gun at yourself.

Titan
Wizard
Demon

Both series are highly recommended, some of the best in the genre.

Red Mars
Green Mars
Blue Mars

And the John Varley Titan trilogy involves long life as well, though it's not really central. It's been a long time since I've read them, but as I recall, at one point the main character captures an enemy and pistol-whips him -- using the barrel of the gun, because, as the author remarks, you don't get to be 200 years old by doing stupid things like pointing a gun at yourself.

Titan
Wizard
Demon

Both series are highly recommended, some of the best in the genre.

Red Mars
Green Mars
Blue Mars

And the John Varley Titan trilogy involves long life as well, though it's not really central. It's been a long time since I've read them, but as I recall, at one point the main character captures an enemy and pistol-whips him -- using the barrel of the gun, because, as the author remarks, you don't get to be 200 years old by doing stupid things like pointing a gun at yourself.

Titan
Wizard
Demon

Both series are highly recommended, some of the best in the genre.

Red Mars
Green Mars
Blue Mars

And the John Varley Titan trilogy involves long life as well, though it's not really central. It's been a long time since I've read them, but as I recall, at one point the main character captures an enemy and pistol-whips him -- using the barrel of the gun, because, as the author remarks, you don't get to be 200 years old by doing stupid things like pointing a gun at yourself.

Titan
Wizard
Demon

Both series are highly recommended, some of the best in the genre.

Red Mars
Green Mars
Blue Mars

And the John Varley Titan trilogy involves long life as well, though it's not really central. It's been a long time since I've read them, but as I recall, at one point the main character captures an enemy and pistol-whips him -- using the barrel of the gun, because, as the author remarks, you don't get to be 200 years old by doing stupid things like pointing a gun at yourself.

Titan
Wizard
Demon

Both series are highly recommended, some of the best in the genre.

Red Mars
Green Mars
Blue Mars

And the John Varley Titan trilogy involves long life as well, though it's not really central. It's been a long time since I've read them, but as I recall, at one point the main character captures an enemy and pistol-whips him -- using the barrel of the gun, because, as the author remarks, you don't get to be 200 years old by doing stupid things like pointing a gun at yourself.

Titan
Wizard
Demon

Both series are highly recommended, some of the best in the genre.

No, it's because American dead rats have higher magic content.

that was either The Mote in God's Eye or its sequel, The Gripping Hand, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. Both are excellent books, but I forget which one had the museum / fortress concept.

You might find Four arguments for the elimination of television an interesting read.

Danny Dunn and the Homework Machine.

For those that don't know him, Hal Stern has been associated with Sun for a long time and is one of the "sharp good" guys IMHO. He's written several Sysadmin related books including the classic "Managing NFS and NIS" and here's a 1995 Sysadmin article where he dives into adb - clearly a technical guy who knows his stuff ... although the article is more about marketing and pricing.

Well in a Libertarian society you actually have property rights. So having an industrial age job isn't necessary to feed and cloth your family. As long as you can have a little plot of land, some rain and some sunshine. Obviously we don't want to go to an agricultural society with a barter system, but it does give you leverage. Nobody should feel like they have to take a job or starve.

But with property tax, business licenses, sales tax, etc the way they are. It's basically impossible for an impoverished person to set up a tent and start a business selling home grown eggplants and cucumbers using the few dollars in capital they got from panhandling.

If you obviously are unable to work, then you can fall on the safety net of one of the many providers of aid (churchs, benefit groups, individuals, etc).

I'm not so sure Libertarianism can be easily reguarded as "crap", when it wasn't the reason for the collapse of the socioeconomic system in chile during the industrial revolution.

If you're wondering what the parent is refering to. Try this article on Anarchism in Chile. Or possibly he was refering to the book After Worlds Collide. Which is either socialist tripe or a fair warning of libertarianism and capitialism.

If you haven't read the New Frontier series of books by Peter David, you should. The characters and story lines would make a great series, and would bring back the old feeling of the series that made it great.

Why Mensa's are so perfect

I mean, real Literature with an uppercase A, not only documentation.

Two interesting books about what if all your world was virtual:

A masterwork is Charles Williams' Descent into Hell. Here a historian gets, by special providence of a kind of a genie, to recreate his own beloved as he wishes instead of disputing her with a younger, more daring rival. By doing so he ends up cutting himself from all reality, thus effectively becoming irrecuperably mad - and also committing himself to Hell too in the process.

A lighter, more to the point, but also even more overtly Christian book to the point of being a bit doctrinaire, is CS Lewis's The Great Divorce. Here, Hell is just what happens when everyone can have whatever he wants; soon enough people discover they can't live near other people's ideas of what the world should be, and the result is that everyone but the newly arrived lives in perfect isolation at ever-crescent distances from one another.

No. At least not according to isbn.nu or amazon but strangely enough, ISFDB does show Pournelle as an author. Well, lets check a more authoritative source... Library of Congress and you are definitely correct, Pournelle is also listed. Thanks for the info!

No shame in the For Dummies series brother or sister. A few grace my shelves also. I find them useful when you dont need to sift through tons of BS to get to what you want.

I've browsed in a few, and they seem pretty much on the ball usually, no really big stinkers on first look. The "for dummies" title is basically a way of poking fun at themselves, well, and their readership. Anyway, it's meant as a joke.

Other series however, seem to take such titles perhaps a little bit too seriously.

What are we to make, for example, of "The Complete Idiot's Guide To Past Life Regression"?

At least they have a clear understanding of their focus group.

I always thought The Buck Book: All Sorts of Things to Do With a Dollar Bill-Besides Spend It was a great example of applied origami in real life. Sadly I don't have this book, but it would be really cool to fold up dollar bills for leaving as tips, etc. Also, check out Money Folding, Dollar Bill Animals in Origami: The National Origami Treasury, Dollar Bill Origami, and Money Folding 2.

I always thought The Buck Book: All Sorts of Things to Do With a Dollar Bill-Besides Spend It was a great example of applied origami in real life. Sadly I don't have this book, but it would be really cool to fold up dollar bills for leaving as tips, etc. Also, check out Money Folding, Dollar Bill Animals in Origami: The National Origami Treasury, Dollar Bill Origami, and Money Folding 2.

I always thought The Buck Book: All Sorts of Things to Do With a Dollar Bill-Besides Spend It was a great example of applied origami in real life. Sadly I don't have this book, but it would be really cool to fold up dollar bills for leaving as tips, etc. Also, check out Money Folding, Dollar Bill Animals in Origami: The National Origami Treasury, Dollar Bill Origami, and Money Folding 2.

I always thought The Buck Book: All Sorts of Things to Do With a Dollar Bill-Besides Spend It was a great example of applied origami in real life. Sadly I don't have this book, but it would be really cool to fold up dollar bills for leaving as tips, etc. Also, check out Money Folding, Dollar Bill Animals in Origami: The National Origami Treasury, Dollar Bill Origami, and Money Folding 2.

I always thought The Buck Book: All Sorts of Things to Do With a Dollar Bill-Besides Spend It was a great example of applied origami in real life. Sadly I don't have this book, but it would be really cool to fold up dollar bills for leaving as tips, etc. Also, check out Money Folding, Dollar Bill Animals in Origami: The National Origami Treasury, Dollar Bill Origami, and Money Folding 2.

How about this? It's for true geniuses.

Besides, need we get into the debate about exactly how big that arc would have to have been in order to contain two of every species on earth?

And Bookpool cheaper still:
http://www.bookpool.com/.x/ierdixxv34/ss/1?qs=hard ware+hacking

Disclosure Note: I wrote part of the book, and the deal the publisher has with Bookpool sometimes results in slightly higher royalties for me. They do often have the best price, though.

You can do your own comparison shopping, of course:
http://isbn.nu/1932266836/shipover/

Your best deal usually depends on shipping.

AITree Cognitive Architecture -- AI Has Been Solved for Wi-Fi Robots
The mind-modules below are ordered in such a way that you may comprehend the internal structure of the AI4U Mind-1.1 software at a glance. Notice for instance how many subroutines are nested beneath the Sensorium module. You may click on any mind-module listed here to read its documentation and to inspect its source code in Forth or JavaScript. This primitive AI-has-been-solved implementation is an invitation for you to build upon the current cognitive architecture by enlarging it or by specializing in your own favorite mind-module.

• Alife Module for Immortal Wi-Fi Cyborgs and Wi-Fi Robots
  • enBoot (English Bootstrap to introduce a few concepts and structures)
  • Security (for both robot and human safety and for housekeeping)
  • HCI (Human-Computer Interaction for the operator of the Wi-Fi robot)
  • Rejuvenate (so that a Wi-Fi robot or cyborg may live potentially forever)
  • psiDecay (for the gradual deactivation of concepts over time)
  • Ego (for resurrecting a Wi-Fi robot when perhaps brain-dead by misadventure)

• Sensorium (audition, taste, smell, etc., including exotic robot senses)
  • Audition (for the Wi-Fi robot to have a sense of hearing)
    --- Listen (necesary for event-driven hearing and for detecting verbal input)
    --- --- audSTM (auditory Short Term Memory with associative tags for recognition)
    --- --- --- audRecog (auditory Recognition of sounds and phonemes done by pattern recognition)
    --- oldConcept (for the recognition of words already known to the AI)
    --- --- Parser (for the identification of parts of speech in word-recognition)
    --- --- --- Instantiate (to create an instance or concept-node on a concept-fiber)
    --- --- Activate (to reactivate known concepts)
    --- --- --- spreadAct (spreading Activation for thinking by association)
    --- newConcept (contributes to machine learning of new words)
    --- --- enVocab (English Vocabulary, and potentially others)
    --- --- Parser (for determining the part of speech of any input word)
    --- --- --- Instantiate (for creating new concept-nodes or instances)

• Emotion (fear, love, hope, etc., so that Wi-Fi robots may have human-like feelings)

• Think (for the linguistic generation of thought)
  • Activate (for the reactivation of known concepts)
    --- spreadAct (spreading Activation so that thoughts may form)

I can't praise Powers enough. And yet, the usual scifi/fantasy geeks here on Slashdot and elsewhere, the kind who devours Gaiman, Stephenson, Heinlein, Adams etc., don't seem to be aware of Powers. Are his books hard to find? Badly marketed? Not cool enough?

If anyone can do the disturbing, visceral, gothic and above all surreal magical realism, it is Powers. Gaiman is a good, inventive author. Occasionally in American Gods there are brief flashes of storytelling where situations cohere into solid, memorable set pieces. In Powers' books, the prose feels like magic, like some decisive, pivotal junction of history, on every single page. The characters really stand out, and the narration really reaches for your senses.

The book I would start with is The Anubis Gates , a story superficially about a present-day literature professor who becomes stuck in Victorian-times London. It also involves Egyptian magicians. And time portals. And a cloned Lord Byron. And some business with a huge ape on a rampage. And a guy who switches bodies. And a seriously zonked-out Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Other relevant names for those who like Gaiman are James P. Blaylock, John Crowley (I particularly like his early The Deep, a strange and fascinating pseudo-fantasy novel) and Jonathan Carroll (just avoid White Apples).