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base_chakra writes "In response to Steve Ballmer's recent, vague criticisms of Linux and UNIX vendors' product support structures and pricing schemes, I've compiled a reference chart which might help others to compare licensing and support options available from several big-name vendors. Kudos to Red Hat for having the simplest, most accessible licensing and service plan of the pack--as well as one of the most affordable!"

John Suda writes "There are more new books being published about PHP than you can shake a joystick at. PHP (along with program friends - MySQL and Apache) has become very popular among developers and web designers, and for good reason. As a programming language, it is particularly suited to web development projects, while being relatively easy to write, use and learn. More importantly, it's open-source and free, cross-platform, and widely supported. David Sklar's Learning PHP5 is one of the latest volumes dealing with PHP. It describes itself as 'a Pain-Free Introduction to Building Interactive Web Sites,' and provides a gentle introduction to the latest version of PHP, which is version 5 and only recently available." Read on for Suda's review.

This book is not particularly useful for those experienced already with PHP, nor for those wanting to upgrade their knowledge of PHP from versions 4 and earlier to the newest version. It's also probably not particularly useful for those power programmers who need and want a deep and comprehensive coverage of the topic. But it is a very well-written and designed introduction to PHP 5 for beginning programmers or those experienced PERL, ASP, or Cold Fusion programmers who want to learn a different language. There are many illustrations and code samples sprinkled throughout the book. Sklar, however, skims over some topics, concentrating instead on practical examples.

The publisher is O'Reilly Media, Inc. which seems to have an editor's policy of covering complex computer-related topics in a comprehensive manner by publishing a range of volumes covering different aspects of a topic or from different angles or for different audiences. O'Reilly also publishes volumes on moving to PHP 5 (Upgrading to PHP 5), detailed and technical PHP (Programming PHP), and a collection of solutions to common PHP programming problems (The PHP Cookbook).

Sklar is an experienced consultant in computer software development and technical training. He is the author of Essential PHP Tools and coauthor of the aforementioned The PHP Cookbook. He takes a deliberate and comprehensive approach to explaining PHP 5, not in great depth, but with the intent of providing enough information, concepts, detail, and scope to create a pleasant and useful read of a technical subject. The basic promise of PHP is in the relatively easy creation of more dynamic and interesting web sites which would include, for example, product catalogs, blogs, photo galleries, event calendars, forms, and more.

There are 13 chapters and 3 appendices. The early chapters provide an orientation to PHP, including its place in contemporary web development, its basic rules, and its syntax. They explain the basic background of PHP and how it interacts with the browser and web server. Later chapters introduce primary concepts like loops, arrays, and functions. The idea here is to facilitate learning the fundamentals of the grammar and vocabulary. Chapters 2 through 12 have short exercises at the end of each to allow the reader to practice writing PHP code and to test learning. (The answers are contained in Appendix C.) Experienced programmers and geeks may recoil at the inclusion of these exercises, but they are useful for beginners.

Chapter 6 provides a practical exercise - how to make and use a web form. The author shows how to access form variables, how to validate user-inputted data for security and efficiency reasons, and how to process forms using functions. Chapter 7 shows how PHP interacts with database programs, like SQL and Oracle, but focuses primarily on MySQL, and demonstrates how to organize data, connect to a server-based database, create tables, and enter and retrieve data.

The rest of the middle chapters cover the use and implementation of cookies and sessions, handling dates and time, and working with files. The practical exercise using dates and times is creating and displaying a monthly calendar. The final chapters provide brief but practical coverage of XML, debugging, and in Chapter 13, other PHP aspects. PHP is amazingly useful, flexible, and practical. One can deal with graphics, PDF documents, and other media like Flash and Shockwave. It also has mailing and file uploading functions, encryption capabilities, and (for more experienced coders) the ability to run shell commands. The upgraded PHP 5 has new capabilities, which now include object-oriented programming.

Appendix A covers installing and configuring PHP for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux; Appendix B is a short primer on regular expressions and how to use them with PHP.

I found the book to be the most accessible introduction to PHP I have read. It provides the basic fundamentals, engages the reader in practical examples, reinforces learning with exercises, and provides an overall perspective on the scope of PHP programming.

You can purchase Learning PHP 5 from bn.com. (Code examples used in the book can be downloaded at the O'Reilly site for the book, linked above.) Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

John Suda writes "There are more new books being published about PHP than you can shake a joystick at. PHP (along with program friends - MySQL and Apache) has become very popular among developers and web designers, and for good reason. As a programming language, it is particularly suited to web development projects, while being relatively easy to write, use and learn. More importantly, it's open-source and free, cross-platform, and widely supported. David Sklar's Learning PHP5 is one of the latest volumes dealing with PHP. It describes itself as 'a Pain-Free Introduction to Building Interactive Web Sites,' and provides a gentle introduction to the latest version of PHP, which is version 5 and only recently available." Read on for Suda's review. Learning PHP 5 author David Sklar pages 432 publisher O'Reilly rating 9 reviewer John Suda ISBN 0596005601 summary An accessible introduction to the popular web scripting language PHP

This book is not particularly useful for those experienced already with PHP, nor for those wanting to upgrade their knowledge of PHP from versions 4 and earlier to the newest version. It's also probably not particularly useful for those power programmers who need and want a deep and comprehensive coverage of the topic. But it is a very well-written and designed introduction to PHP 5 for beginning programmers or those experienced PERL, ASP, or Cold Fusion programmers who want to learn a different language. There are many illustrations and code samples sprinkled throughout the book. Sklar, however, skims over some topics, concentrating instead on practical examples.

The publisher is O'Reilly Media, Inc. which seems to have an editor's policy of covering complex computer-related topics in a comprehensive manner by publishing a range of volumes covering different aspects of a topic or from different angles or for different audiences. O'Reilly also publishes volumes on moving to PHP 5 (Upgrading to PHP 5), detailed and technical PHP (Programming PHP), and a collection of solutions to common PHP programming problems (The PHP Cookbook).

Sklar is an experienced consultant in computer software development and technical training. He is the author of Essential PHP Tools and coauthor of the aforementioned The PHP Cookbook. He takes a deliberate and comprehensive approach to explaining PHP 5, not in great depth, but with the intent of providing enough information, concepts, detail, and scope to create a pleasant and useful read of a technical subject. The basic promise of PHP is in the relatively easy creation of more dynamic and interesting web sites which would include, for example, product catalogs, blogs, photo galleries, event calendars, forms, and more.

There are 13 chapters and 3 appendices. The early chapters provide an orientation to PHP, including its place in contemporary web development, its basic rules, and its syntax. They explain the basic background of PHP and how it interacts with the browser and web server. Later chapters introduce primary concepts like loops, arrays, and functions. The idea here is to facilitate learning the fundamentals of the grammar and vocabulary. Chapters 2 through 12 have short exercises at the end of each to allow the reader to practice writing PHP code and to test learning. (The answers are contained in Appendix C.) Experienced programmers and geeks may recoil at the inclusion of these exercises, but they are useful for beginners.

Chapter 6 provides a practical exercise - how to make and use a web form. The author shows how to access form variables, how to validate user-inputted data for security and efficiency reasons, and how to process forms using functions. Chapter 7 shows how PHP interacts with database programs, like SQL and Oracle, but focuses primarily on MySQL, and demonstrates how to organize data, connect to a server-based database, create tables, and enter and retrieve data.

The rest of the middle chapters cover the use and implementation of cookies and sessions, handling dates and time, and working with files. The practical exercise using dates and times is creating and displaying a monthly calendar. The final chapters provide brief but practical coverage of XML, debugging, and in Chapter 13, other PHP aspects. PHP is amazingly useful, flexible, and practical. One can deal with graphics, PDF documents, and other media like Flash and Shockwave. It also has mailing and file uploading functions, encryption capabilities, and (for more experienced coders) the ability to run shell commands. The upgraded PHP 5 has new capabilities, which now include object-oriented programming.

Appendix A covers installing and configuring PHP for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux; Appendix B is a short primer on regular expressions and how to use them with PHP.

I found the book to be the most accessible introduction to PHP I have read. It provides the basic fundamentals, engages the reader in practical examples, reinforces learning with exercises, and provides an overall perspective on the scope of PHP programming.

You can purchase Learning PHP 5 from bn.com. (Code examples used in the book can be downloaded at the O'Reilly site for the book, linked above.) Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Sarusa writes "This may be the easiest book review I've ever written. If you program in Python and you want to write Internet applications, go buy Foundations of Python Network Programming by John Goerzen. There. What, you wanted more? Well, okay, but then I'm back to playing Katamari Damacy." Read on for the rest of Sarusa's review. Foundations of Python Network Programming author John Goerzen pages 500 publisher Apress rating 9 of 10 reviewer Sarusa ISBN 1590593715 summary If you program in Python, and you want to write Internet applications, you need this book.

First of all, 'Network' means 'Internet.' Everything in the book concerns protocols running over IP, which is almost anything useful these days. That said, this is a lot of ground to cover -- there's FTP, HTTP, POP3, IMAP, DNS, a veritable explosion of acronyms, and this book does a great job of hitting all the ones you're likely to need.

Foundations assumes you already know Python, but nothing about network programming. The first 100 pages covers the basics of IP, TCP, UDP, sockets and ports, server vs. daemon, clients, DNS, and more advanced topics like broadcast and IPv6. And in case you already know all that, how Python deals with them. This is the only part of the book you will probably read in order. After that you pick what you need.

Find a topic you need to know how to deal with, such as using XML-RPC, and locate the appropriate section of the book. There he'll cover the basics of the topic, show you how to use the correct Python module(s) to implement it, explain any gotchas (this is key!), and write a short but functional application or two that uses it. I'm not sure why this book isn't called 'Practical Python Network Programming.' It's eminently Practical. It won't make your heart race, but it tells you exactly what you need to get the job done.

All this information is out there to find for free, but having it all collected and summarized is worth every penny. And the real value is having the edge conditions and not-so-obvious practical details explained by someone who's obviously used this stuff in the field. Python and its excellent libraries make Internet tasks relatively easy, but it's even easier with some expert help, and the libraries assume you already know what you're trying to do. For example, if you're doing a DNS.Request() record query and using a DNS.Type.ANY, it (for good reason) returns information cached by your local servers, which may be incomplete. If you really need all the records you need to skip your local servers and issue a query to the name server for the domain. This is isn't hard; you just have to know what's going on. Or do you know which exceptions can get raised if you're using urllib to fetch web pages? It's here. Exception handling is not neglected.

So you know what you're getting, here's a laundry list of topics: IP, TCP, UDP, sockets, timeouts, network data formats, inetd/xinetd, syslog, DNS, IPv6, broadcast, binding to specific addresses, poll and select, writing a web client, SSL, parsing HTML and XHTML, XML and XML-RPC, email composition and decoding, MIME, SMTP, POP, IMAP, FTP, MySQL/PostgreSQL/zxJDBC (though you won't learn SQL), HTTP and XML-RPC servers, CGI, and mod_python. As a bonus you get some chapters on forking and threading (for writing servers) and handling asynchronous communication in general.

Just to find something to complain about churlishly, I wish Goerzen had managed to do all this and make it scintillatingly brilliant and witty from cover to cover (all 500 pages); perhaps dropping juicy bon mots of gossip from the Debian project. And while I'm at it I'd like a pony. No, seriously. If you program in Python, intend to do anything Internet related, and aren't already a Python networking god, you need Foundations of Python Network Programming. In terms of 'hours I could have saved if only I had this book sooner' it would have paid for itself many times over.

You can purchase Foundations of Python Network Programming from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Sarusa writes "Video games are big business. Movies are big business. I hear that people used read a lot of things called books: it seems like there would be a lot of money to be made from a successful merger of what makes books and movies compelling with what makes video games compelling, though we've been trying that for decades with little success. Interactive Storytelling: Techniques for 21st Century Fiction by Andrew Glassner takes a look at what we know about stories, what we know about games, how they work (or don't work) together now, and how they might work together in the future." Read on for the rest of Sarusa's review. Interactive Storytelling author Andrew Glassner pages 500 publisher A. K. Peters rating 7 of 10 reviewer Sarusa ISBN 1568812213 summary A solid look at the elusive merger of movies and video games.

First, this is a book that everybody who wants to make compelling games should read. That said, however, it isn't really a book you would read for fun -- it's more of a textbook. The first half of the text is a necessarily rather dry presentation of concepts: for example, nine pages on 'Narrative Devices.' Glassner uses copious examples from movies that you've probably seen and games that you've probably played, and the text is certainly an easy read and well written, but it's still a very step-by-step presentation. You can't hide the fact that you're supposed to be learning something here. The second half of the book does open up a bit as he goes beyond just priming you on story and game theory.

He starts out by assuming you know almost nothing about storytelling. You might think that this is too obvious, but if you've played enough storytelling abominations like 'Sudeki,' you will know that game creators usually don't make very compelling storywriters. So the first quarter of the book is a crash course on the fundamentals of writing stories -- characters, plot, and techniques. The second, slightly shorter, part of the book examines the mechanisms of games in general. Not video games in specific, but all types of games. The five types of games, scoring rules, structure, and theory.

We're now ready to actually tackle merging stories and games, and at this point our cunning vision falls apart. Glassner's strongly held opinion, which he argues quite coherently, is that a great story is the product of one (or a few) expert storytellers presenting a strong, consistent vision to you, the consumer. The fabled holy grail of gaming is letting the player do whatever they want -- full interactivity. And this is to a point fundamentally incompatible with telling a great story. Conflict drives most stories -- what if the player quite reasonably minimizes conflict? But there's a lot to be learned from where they do contradict each other, and some common ground to be found. In my favorite chapter in the book, 'Common Pitfalls,' he uses specific video games that blatantly demonstrate how to not apply even the simplest rules of good storytelling and user immersion.

Many of the fundamental insights in this part are 'obvious,' yet demonstrably unobvious to most video game designers. For example, that people gravitate toward the entertainment that has the highest fun-to-work ratio. Television is hugely popular since the fun is high to very low, but the work is near zero. They will do more work if it offers a lot more fun. Which means you shouldn't force your players to do stupid, boring, unnecessary work like running through a dozen screens again and again to get between important locations. "A game should offer the fastest and easiest possible way to do everything unless there is some entertaining or informative reason to prevent it." Preach on!

The last part of the book finally deals with the 'interactive storytelling,' slowly building up ever more ambitious plans till we're in the realm of the purely experimental. Several reasonably fleshed out examples are given, and some of them seem quite plausible even with today's technology. The balance between future technology (holograms and AI) and the reality of today is considered. Glassner is quite a skeptic about AI and the holodeck from Star Trek, but explores how tricks such as emergent behavior and setting expectations low and then beating them can work for you. For instance, if your AI is driving an animal (rather than a human), the players will be much more forgiving. Or if you give the user attractive, static graphics up front, they will be projected onto the cruder in-game graphics. Because of the conflict between a great story and complete interactivity, he suggests 'participatory storytelling' is a better goal than fully interactive storytelling.

Particularly interesting is the discussion of 'living masks.' Most people don't like to act, because they know it takes skill and that bad acting is very painful. But what if you could be 'in' a character that would take what you were doing at home and then do it in character on stage, so everyone involved could act to the best of their abilities but still 'be' a good actor? You'd have some control over the gross reactions, but the details would be up to the software. Obviously, we're nowhere near that level of sophistication, but there's a lot of time left in the 21st century. It does mean that a large portion of the book deals with techniques that are right now totally impractical.

My biggest disappointment with this part of the book is that it implicitly seems to assume that all games in the future will be multiplayer, as they're the focus of all the examples. And at this point Glassner has pretty much transcended mere 'games' for his vision of the future of entertainment. But it's easy to see how they could be adapted to the single-player games which will hopefully still be available in 2099.

To summarize, I think anyone with a serious interest in telling stories via video games or interactive fiction should read Interactive Storytelling. It's well written and does a good job of teaching concepts that most people making currently making video games could use a lot of help with. Furthermore, Glassner's vision of the future of storytelling is fascinating, even if it doesn't play out that way. However, I would not recommend that you pick this book up as a casual read. If you're looking for that, you might be better off with Creating Emotion in Games by David Freeman or perhaps The Art of Interactive Design by Chris Crawford. Or, though it somewhat destroys the rigorous chain of thought, skip the first half of Interactive Storytelling, then go back and digest it piece-by-piece later.

You can purchase Interactive Storytelling from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Sarusa writes "Simulations and the Future of Learning chronicles the attempt by one company -- convinced that the business e-Learning establishment has squandered its potential to build a 'leadership simulator' -- to actually create such a thing, and by doing so prove that simulation is a better educational tool than straight linear regurgitation. The sheer chutzpah of trying to simulate 'Leadership' may stagger you, 'but it means there's plenty of room for interest here. While not quite comparable to The Soul of a New Machine, as a breathless blurb suggests, it is a highly interesting read." Read on for the rest of Sarusa's review. An Innovative (and Perhaps Revolutionary) Approach to e-Learning author Clark Aldrich pages 280 publisher Pfeiffer rating 9 of 10 reviewer Sarusa ISBN 0787969621 summary The story of the creation of a 'leadership simulator' and an argument for simulation as the future of education.

This isn't really a technical book -- it's a manifesto aimed at the middle- to upper-level manager, and indeed the very first page is an executive summary that attempts to convince you to read this book while swilling martinis instead of playing another round of golf. But don't let that throw you -- it provides enough medium- to low-level meat to keep a geek happy (and after my review of > Shaggy Steed I think I can claim to be a huge nerd). You certainly won't find any code, but it's not a puff piece.

Clark Aldrich had a cushy job at the Gartner Group in charge of e-Learning coverage, but felt that the promise of e-Learning was being distressingly wasted by emphasis on the fast-food mentality of quantity over quality and churning out of tons of linear crud, just because it's so easy to do. The real promise of e-Learning isn't just as an online textbook, but as a simulator. And for life-or-death situations, it's the best way to teach people before letting them take a whack at the real thing. The U.S. military knows this. Airlines know this. Medical colleges know this. 'The organizations that care the most about training use simulations.' So he quit his sweet but corrupt job, and co-founded a company to teach leadership via a simulation: 'Virtual Leader.'

The sheer scope of the company's ambition had me shaking my head, convinced that this was going to end in brilliant failure. Especially as they decide one piece at a time that they need to write everything, including the graphics engine, from scratch. But finally, over time and budget, harsh reality sets in and they start distilling their huge collection of data on the nebulous concept of Leadership down to something workable. The meeting is the crucible where everything gets done in the world of the manager.

Virtual Leader places you in progressively higher-powered meetings and tracks their 'Three-to-One' model of leadership: good leadership is getting positive Work done in the short and long term, and levels of Power, Ideas, and Tension affect this. It's your task to try to ferret out good ideas and get them agreed to while heading off bad ideas. Of course, in later meetings you won't be the most powerful person in the room, so you have to carefully nudge things where they need to go by making alliances and building and spending your personal influence. At the end you're ranked on how you did on several metrics. And, of course, all this has to be simple enough for a computerphobe to use.

Simulations follows the project stage-by-stage from concept to finished product: what went wrong, what went right, what hard decisions and tradeoffs had to be made. Perhaps most fascinating is the dialogue system. It's not a script; the characters are all actually responding in real time to simulation variables from a library of 2500 voiced phrases. Thus it sounds slightly stilted and unnatural, but you can tell what's going on. And it isn't as mind-numbingly dull as the repeated generic approval/disapproval phrases they started with.

The book is a fast and easy read -- you could easily finish it in a night. The section on their failed dealings with supposed Leadership Gurus is extremely funny. And he dishes out the dirt on the e-Learning industry pretty well. What keeps Simulations from New Machine stature is the lack of any connection with members of the team -- there's no personal tension or pathos. The real star is the simulation itself. After all, his goal for the book isn't to provide you with human drama, but to sell the corporate world on simulations and demonstrate the process of building one from scratch.

And in the end, Aldrich makes a strong argument that simulations are the real future of learning. I had fun reading this book: it didn't take too much time, and I learned a few things (including some guilty glances into the minds of mid-level managers). Two polygonal thumbs up. You can see movies of the product in action at simulearn.net, though unfortunately there's no demo -- they want you to cough up for the seminars. Or you could just read the book!

You can purchase Simulations and the Future of Learning from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Sarusa writes "The title of the book, Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering, is nice and controversial, and so is the content. Robert Glass is a long-time software engineer and researcher into what software practices work, which don't, and why. You'll find his name all over the literature along with names like Yourdon and Brooks, and he's got a long list of professional credits. In other words, he's an experienced, cranky, opinionated old coot who pulls no punches and writes a very readable and useful book. And he's on your side, having deliberately passed up a more lucrative career in management for a technical track." Read on for the rest of Sarusa's review. Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering author Robert L. Glass pages 190 publisher Addison-Wesley rating 8 out of 10 reviewer Sarusa ISBN 0321117425 summary 40 years of software engineering research in a nutshell.

The Layout

Facts and Fallacies is not a technically demanding book; it's a very easy and compelling read. There are 55 Facts (and 5+5 fallacies) grouped into logical sections such as Management, Life Cycle, and Quality.

First, each Fact is stated succinctly. (For instance, Fact 1: The most important factor in software work is not the tools or techniques used by the programmers, but rather the quality of the programmers themselves.) Then the point is fleshed out more fully -- in this case, that even with all the periodic hype for some hot new methodology that promises orders of magnitude greater productivity, the quality of your programmers matters far more than anything else (and even the best new methods only offer 5-35% increases).

Next, the level of controversy about this Fact is discussed. For Fact 1, it's that even though everyone pays lip service to the idea of people being more important than processes, we all still act like it's not true. Maybe this new hot methodology can turn all your lousy programmers into great ones! Perhaps it's because people are a harder problem to address than tools, techniques, and process. And, of course, hot new methodologies sell a lot of books.

Finally comes a list of sources and references, which can lead you to more in-depth great reading like Peopleware and Software Runaways. This all works out to about one to two pages per item.

The Facts and Fallacies

The Facts and Fallacies fall into several groups. Some are not well known (or just met with stunned disbelief) such as Fact 31: Error removal is the most time-consuming phase of the life cycle. Some that are pretty well accepted, but are mostly ignored, like Fact 1 above. Some that are accepted, but nobody can agree on what to do about (if anything), like Fact 9 (paraphrased) #150: Project estimates are done at the beginning of the project when you have insufficient understanding of the requirements and scope, which makes it a very bad time to do an estimate for the entire project.

Some Facts Glass acknowledges many people will flat out disagree with (and for a few people, very loudly), like Fact 30: COBOL is a very bad language, but all the others (for business data processing) are so much worse. These are the Facts where he really has an axe to grind, and make for amusing reading. In this case what he's really saying is that there is a use for domain-specific languages intended to do one specific thing and do it well, rather than languages like C and Java which attempt to be "good enough" for any use under the sun. But everyone hates COBOL, including me, so it's controversial.

What's Good?

Again, this is a good (and fast) Read. Even if you don't agree with everything, Glass is a skilled writer with strong opinions and a sense of humor. And you might end up agreeing more than you expected. I was pretty skeptical when I started reading. After all, I'm a long time software engineer with strong opinions too, and how often do you get opinionated geeks to agree on even what soda or text editor to use? But most of the Facts resonated with my experience, and of course for most of them Glass has substantial research reference for. The best Facts are those that you knew but might never have expressed explicitly, like Fact 41: Maintenance typically consumes 40 to 80 percent (average, 60 percent) of software costs. Therefore, it is probably the most important life cycle phase of software.

Or consider Fact 18: There are two 'rules of three' in reuse: (a) it is three times as difficult to build reusable components as single use components, and (b) a reusable component should be tried out in three different applications before it will be sufficiently general to accept into a reuse library. I knew this generally, and you probably did too, but I didn't know the specific reference for "Biggerstaff's Rules of Three," which give you a ballpark figure.

The book was written in 2002, when eXtreme Programming was hot, and it's very interesting that the predictions Glass made in this book about the strengths and weaknesses of XP were, in retrospect, pretty much on target, and this sort of predictive success helps confirm more viscerally that he knows his subject.

What's Bad?

There are a few Facts in here that Glass included just because he feels strongly about them (or even about specific people) and he doesn't really back them up very strongly except with "well golly, this is so obvious." Like Fallacy 5: Programming can and should be egoless. Note that this is a Fallacy, so he opposes it. I happen to agree with him, but his arguments are mostly personal ox-goring even if they're based on his extensive experience. Still, it's an interesting read.

A few of the Fallacies he feels are so obvious that he doesn't even really bother providing sources or references for them, and this somewhat diminishes the overall feel of rigor.

Really, the worst thing about this book is that it doesn't come with a poster of just a bullet-pointed list of facts and fallacies that you can nail to your office wall (or your boss's).

A Few More Facts

Just to whet your appetite:

Fact 21: For every 25% increase in problem complexity, there is a 100% increase in solution complexity.

Fact 37: Rigorous inspections [code reviews] can remove up to 90% of errors before the first test case is run. [But are so mentally and emotionally exhausting that we rarely do them.]

Fallacy 10: You teach people how to program by showing them how to write programs. Why don't we teach them to read programs first? Good question (and he has a few possible answers).

In Conclusion

I wouldn't say this Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering is quite as powerful as The Mythical Man Month, Peopleware or Death March on their own, but if you program (or manage programmers) and want to be more than just a code pig, this will give you the condensed version of 40 years of research in a very readable package. Even if you don't agree with everything he says, it's well worth considering it.

You can purchase Facts and Fallacies of Software Engineering from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews. To see your own review here, carefully read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

skillio writes "Everyone's favorite OS maven, Bill Gates, announced a release date for Longhorn on Friday. He confirms what many had suspected - Microsoft will attempt to complete this release in calendar year 2006. The most notable element of this announcement was Gates' admission that WinFS, Microsoft's next-generation file system, would not be complete in time for this release - surprising, since this was the most hyped component of the next iteration of Windows."

Socrates writes "GamerDad has an article up called 'The Media War', a feature discussing videogames in the context of violent media and the well-meaning groups who try to censor it. 'The war against violent media is not new. Learn the history of media controversy, and take a sobering look at what's in store for gamers down the road.' The piece includes quotes from Douglas Lowenstein of the ESA and IGDA spokesman Jason Della Rocca."

HaloZero writes "The title was publicly revealed today in a special presentation to a packed audience of Star Wars fans at Comic-Con International in San Diego, California. The title wasn't the only surprise for those in attendance at the presentation. Click here for news about even more Star Wars DVDs in 2004 and 2005, surprise celebrity guests, new planets in Episode III, and more."

Andrew writes "GamerDad has an article up about how religion is handled in computer gaming, titled 'Game With God'. The article features quotes from Sid Meier, Jane Jensen, Will Wright, Peter Molyneaux, Phil Steinmeyer, and Richard Garriott. Here's a snippet: 'While religion and spirituality add a lot to a game world, they often aren't used effectively. 'I don't think there are any games that treat religion at anything more than a superficial level,'; says Firaxis founder and Civilization creator Sid Meier. PopTop Software's Phil Steinmeyer agrees, noting that 'Religion is ignored in gaming, or if it is portrayed, it's wildly caricatured.'"

thrash242 writes "After much re-re-re-rechecking, the official Doom 3 site finally has some real content, instead of just 'Coming soon' - it also confirms the August 3rd ship date. Woohoo!"

HawKe writes "OLEDs are back in the news and Audioholics reports on what makes the technology so special as well as who leads the pack in currently shipping products, vaporware, and displays that are on the horizon. The crux of the matter is whether or not OLEDs, the "eco-friendly" choice, can outpace current LCD and plasma display advances. In order to enter and dominate the home theater and computer display markets, they must not only establish themselves, but also beat the leaders in price and performance."

karnifex writes "Filled up your LaCie Bigger Disk already, and looking for a little more storage space? Good news! The Petabox is ready! 'The petabox by the Internet Archive is a machine designed to safely store and process one petabyte of information (a petabyte is a million gigabytes).' And luckily, as the Internet Archive notes, it's shipping-container friendly (20' x 8' x 8'). So save on delivery costs and order two!"

Roosevelt Franklin writes "GamerDad.com put up a great interview with videogaming pioneer Ralph Baer today. He talks about the birth of the game industry, the Brown Box (Magnavox Odyssey), the Atari/Pong lawsuit, his patents, and a parent's responsibility. Baer is the original Game God and GamerDad calls him the Original GamerDad too!" Baer says of Pong and patent infringement: "After ten years of litigation in courts from Chicago to San Francisco we collected many tens of millions of dollars."

VeggiePossum23 writes "PC WORLD has an article about rising concerns that computer manufacturers will be cutting the amount of bundled RAM they sell with their PCs owing to rising prices of dynamic memory. The article claims that spot pricing shows a rise of almost $15.00 for 256MB modules of DDR DRAM in some markets. According to a Reuters article on ZDNet, the price rises are caused by shortage of memory chips, and this is causing the prices of memory to raise at the fastest rate in four years. Even Intel is said to be worried at the overall trend of price hikes for all types of memory. The Inquirer has a similiar article from a couple of weeks ago which includes a chart showing how the third-party memory manufacturers are doing. Kingston tops the chart for revenue."

anomalie asks: "I am trying to sell IP telephony to my employer. The idea was shot down once already because of the cost (using a Cisco solution). I would like to find a cheap but reliable IP PBX because everyone liked the idea of IP telephony, just not the price associated with it. I need a system that could initially handle about 80 users at a single location, and eventually handle about 350 users at 7 locations. The two systems I have been looked at so far are Asterisk & Pingtel's SIPxchange IP PBX. I'm not looking here for a final solution, just some starting points for more research. Any feedback/tips/warnings from the Slashdot community?" "I am looking to have at least the following capabilities:
-Auto attendant
-Handle a PRI (hopefully allow forwarding of old PBX DIDs)
-Handle long distance T1 (we would initially segment off some channels from our current PBX)
-Handle WAN Traffic so we could utilize our unused channels for long distance from other locations
-Forwarding of voicemails to email

Nice optional features:
-Web based GUI for voicemail administration
-GUI call manager

Eventually, we would have relay units at the other locations to handle the local calls and call routing and have 1 central PBX at corporate headquarters."

Sarusa writes "eXtreme Programming has been quite the lucrative phenomenon, with a slew of articles and a bookshelf full of 20+ books on the subject, rivaling even UML for fecundity. With all the hype, where's the opposing viewpoint? Well, it's not often as profitable to write a book on the downside of a hot trend, but Matt Stephens and Doug Rosenberg managed to find a publisher for Extreme Programming Refactored: The Case Against XP by Matt Stephens and Doug Rosenberg, henceforth referred to as XP Refactored because I'm eXtremely Lazy. This book is not intended entirely as a hit piece - as the title indicates, they do spend some time examining what works in XP and how it can be used sanely. (Please note that this book has been reviewed on Slashdot once before, but from a slightly different perspective.)" Read on for the rest of Sarusa's review. Extreme Programming Refactored: The Case Against XP author Matt Stephens and Doug Rosenberg pages 432 publisher APress rating 8 of 10 reviewer Sarusa ISBN 1590590961 summary A book you should definitely read along with 'Extreme Programming Explained'. Makes its points quite well, though a bit over the top in places.

Where I'm Coming From I've worked on several large projects (and innumerable small ones) as programmer and/or system designer. I thought long and hard about shelling out my $30 for this book (list price is $39.99, but you can find it for less online), and more importantly, scheduling the time to read it. I pride myself on being a software engineer, concerned with not just cranking out code, but overall system design. On the other hand, after being subjected to various overkill design methodologies, such as full-on UML, I'm wary of things that keep you so busy designing and reading books on the subject that you never get around to doing anything. One of the authors of this book (Rosenberg) is a big UML advocate and has written at least two books on the subject, so I was suspicious.

I want to like XP because I feel strongly about several of XP's source tenets -- such as frequent releases, not bloating the code right now with reusability that will never be needed, refactoring often, and unit testing. And of course it looks sort of 'open-sourcey.' Power to the programmers! I finally decided I had some time to spare, so I lined up Extreme Programming Explained by Kent Beck, Extreme Programming Installed by Ron Jeffries, and XP Refactored.

The Outline XP Refactored starts out by examining eXtreme Programming's basic methodologies and its central claim: In other methodologies, making changes to the project takes exponentially more resources the further along you are in the project. If you make a big change after two years of development, it costs a lot more than a big change after one month of design. XP's basic claim (even if they don't enunciate it this way very often) is to flatten the cost of change by keeping everything in a state of flux all the time. In their words, Embracing Change.

There are 12 canonical XP Practices, and a couple more which weren't part of XP originally but are now gospel, such as collocating -- the entire team needs to fit in one room, or some of the Practices break down. The book goes through the four values, the four activities; basically you get XP in a Nutshell right up front. And the authors do a good job of presenting these in the spirit intended, I think -- after reading this chapter you might feel that XP is a fine thing.

Then we start getting into the juicy bit you bought the book for. They start by examining the infamous C3 project at Chrysler. This was the poster-child XP project that launched XP to stardom and spawned a flood of magazine articles and 20 books on the subject. It was started in 1996 as a payroll system to replace the payroll system running on Chrysler's mainframes, because Chrysler was pretty sure that the Y2K bug would cause all their mainframes to keel over on Jan 1, 2000. Kent Beck was brought in, and he brought in the others. The project was canceled in Feb 2000, when it was apparent that it was still nowhere near done and the mainframes were still working after the drop-dead date.

This chapter really sets the tone for the book. First, we get the too-clever-for-my-taste Beatles filks (song parodies). We get a fairly concise summary of what happened along with references for you to study if you wish. We get lots of satire from the authors. We get copious quotes from XP gurus hanging themselves with their own rope -- and this proves to be one of the most powerful techniques in the book. You are given all the URLs you could ask for to further research the subject yourself, including the XP gurus' own takes on what happened. You will learn that to XP people, 'inexplicable termination' of a horribly late project that has failed in its very reason for existence can be Success. It is at this point that, if you love XP, you will probably fling the book against the wall and walk away. As gleeful as the XP camp was in trumpeting the early successes of the C3 project, the authors of XP Refactored are just as gleeful in dissecting the final outcome and the subsequent confused disarray in the XP camp -- such as TerminationCanBeSuccess.

The next chapter, 'The Case Against XP,' provides the manifesto for the book. It lays out the authors' case in a step-by-step overview. You won't be convinced of anything after reading this chapter, but it summarizes and provides references to later chapters.

'Extremo Culture' examines what kind of people are attracted to XP, how XP plays on the natural inclinations of most programmers who will be attracted by some of the good ideas and not-so-good ideas XP builds on, and the XP culture of fear. XP is obsessed with Fear and Courage -- you must have Courage to do XP, and if you oppose it, it's because you're Afraid of it. You need to be corrected or eliminated (off the team, nothing more violent than that). The only thing that causes project failure is Fear - either you were afraid of XP and weren't doing it right, or someone outside was Afraid of your XP project. I found this chapter quite fascinating, because I could see a lot of myself and the people I've worked with in it.

Having laid out the Practices, and The Case Against XP, the book takes on each of the practices in turn and gives it a thorough going over. This is the largest section of the book, as there are 12 (plus) Practices to cover in detail. The outcome of the analysis is generally negative, though not always -- the authors feel that XP's emphasis on unit tests is a good thing in general and should be expanded to other methodologies. They like frequent releases, just not quite so frequent. The Pair Programming chapter is perhaps the most gleeful, because it's arguably the worst idea in eXtreme Programming when taken to the eXtreme of no programming alone, ever, so there's plenty of fodder for wit and demolishment. But they also examine how Pair Programming is part of the Practices because it's required to compensate for other XP fragilities. This chapter is available as a sample chapter on the authors' website.

After examining the Practices, the book looks at the outcome of another XP research project: what would you expect to happen based on the previous chapters in the book, what did the study report show happened, and what can we learn from this? The predictions of the XP Refactored authors seem to be mostly borne out, and of course they say this proves XP is a bad idea. Though in the end, the study authors said, "But we liked XP anyhow." So you can draw your own conclusions on this one.

And finally, in perhaps the most practical chapter, they take XP and Refactor or 'defang' it. XP makes use of some good ideas, after all. The major failing is taking them all to extremes on the theory that if chocolate tastes good you should eat nothing but chocolate (You think that's silly? Beck reasons exactly this way.) This chapter suggests how to combine XP with real software engineering practices to hopefully achieve manageable, predictable results. Combine flexibility with actual design and risk control. Perhaps not surprisingly, this method resembles a lot what you'll often find small teams of skilled programmers doing on their own. And if you asked them what methodology they were using, they might even say eXtreme Programming, even though they aren't.

What Doesn't Work? Let's start with the bad. The song parodies are unrelenting and painful. If you like filking for the very idea of delicious subversion of media to your own ends, or you are the kind of person who loves any web comic that mentions Star Wars simply because it mentions Star Wars, you may think these are clever. At least they're easy to skip, but severely hamper the utility of handing this book to a manager and saying, "Please read this, it's important." The prose satire sequences and Monty Python skits are less painful, but again often too self-satisfied for their own good. But sometimes nothing makes your point like satire.

If you're a big XP fan coming in, you will almost certainly be turned off by the relentless skewering of XP. Then again, I don't think this book is aimed at you, nor is this review.

XP Refactored does an excellent job of providing all the ammunition you will need to convince anyone who might be thinking of foisting pure XP on you that it's a bad idea, even in manager terms. However, it doesn't provide an 'executive summary' chapter and it could definitely use one - simply because no manager is going to read through this entire book, much of which is in programmer-speak. Chapters 2, 3, 14 and 15 all almost fit the bill, but it needs one chapter with references you can just rip out and hand to your boss to read between holes of golf.

What Works?

Advocates of a position usually fear the other side, and will try to prevent you in some way or another from being subjected to the opposition's best arguments. On the contrary, the authors of XP Refactored seem to feel that the more you read about XP, in the words of Extremos themselves, the better their anti-XP case is made for them. Quotes are used relentlessly, and by the end of the book you will have the eXtreme suspicion that most of the XP authors are making everything up as they go along with no worries about consistency. Which, if you think about it, is pretty XP -- all the contradictory injunctions can be refactored later. Very often the authors' best case against XP is made by a prime quote from an advocate, with reference supplied so you can go verify that it's not out of context, of course.

Secondly, there are frequent Voice of Experience sidebars, which consist of feedback from people who have been involved in XP projects. The authors say they did not solicit these, but when word got out that they were doing the book they started getting submissions anyhow. They delayed the book and added 25 pages in order to fit the VoXP sections. That was very smart, because these notes from the field are quite visceral and provide powerful contrasts between XP in theory and XP in practice -- simply reading the authors' arguments would not be nearly as convincing. For example, the field stories of how XP coaches or managers tend not to do Pair Programming, even while they make everyone else do it, because they hate it too.

XP Refactored is not relentlessly anti-XP, though it sure may seem like it at first blush. The authors do a good job of presenting XP ideas in terms that are not unflattering before they dissect them. They do acknowledge that many XP practices are just good ideas that have been 'turned up to 11' on the theory that more is always better, and will point out the core of a good idea. For instance, rapid releases are a response to the problem of massive unwieldy design methods where everything is supposed to magically all come together at first delivery way down the road, and often doesn't. They also point out that most of XP is a pretty good mode in which to maintain already developed and mature software.

This book makes an important distinction between two levels of XP - the 'official' XP, which is what you'll get in the books (though that's often contradictory) and the 'Extremos' position, which is what you get when the authors argue amongst themselves on Usenet or Wiki and are less guarded and more honest. This is an important distinction as far as theory vs. practice. You'll glean from the various quotes and URLs, if you haven't read the XP books, that Kent Beck is a fairly intelligent guy and knows when it's smart not to go into too much detail on a delicate subject, and when it's time to move on to other causes like Test Directed Development. And then you've got people like Ron Jeffries and Robert Martin who should be thanking their personal gods every day that XP came along and gave people as horribly unqualified to manage or design software a bandwagon to hook onto.

I was a bit harsh earlier on the song parodies and satire sections, but in many cases humor is used quite well to expose the underlying weaknesses or contradictions in XP. That old British humour serves its purpose, and should be well received by the geek audience for the most part. Do you like User Friendly? You should love this.

Finally, the book does an excellent job of clarifying the cultlike nature of XP. How it appeals strongly to coders who think they're being oppressed by The Man and claims to empower them while reducing them to a commodity. Anyone who opposes the culture it is Afraid of you, and needs to be eliminated (non-violently) or ignored. If your XP project fails, it is because you weren't Really Doing XP - any deviation from XP is what lead to disaster. However they'll also tell you it's so flexible you can feel free to change it in any way to fit your way of working. Except you must always Pair Program. Except when you don't. Got that? You may think I am stupidly oversimplifying here, but no, quotes and references are provided. And I'd already gotten a lot of this just by reading two pro-XP books (XP Explained and XP Installed).

Key Points

If you are already pretty sure you want to read XP Refactored, you may want to just skip this section. These are key points I got from reading the book, and of course they're made in far more detail and more cogently in the book itself. This is where you'll find it's pretty clear that I ended up siding with XP Refactored, as well.

The most important argument XP Refactored makes, and uses as a basis through the rest of the book, is that XP is a highly fragile web of high-risk practices which are woven in a tight web to minimize the damage from the other bad practices. These are (mostly) worst-practices that coders engage in because, heck, the most fun part of programming is the coding. So XP attempts to compensate for them and turn them into virtues. For instance, the lack of written documentation is balanced by the code sharing and pair programming, which are supposed to make sure that everyone knows everything about the system. If any one of the practices is not followed religiously, the whole thing comes crashing down. This is referred to as the 'circle of snakes' and is an excellent distillation of what XP books continually hint at but don't tell you outright. XP Refactored goes through each Practice and shows how failing to stick to it causes everything else to collapse, domino-like.

The circle of snakes means that XP (and this is my own analogy, don't blame the authors) is a precariously controlled free-fall, which should get you to where you want to be faster than hiking if you can maintain control. But people don't stick to the practices 100%, because they're very high discipline, the circle unwinds, and the snakes are venomous. As usual in the book, this viewpoint is validated by plenty of quotes from the Extremos themselves, who will tell you that any XP project failed only because you deviated from XP. And XP is such a high discipline methodology that unless you are continuously coerced back onto the true path, you will deviate from it; this is also covered in the C3 chapter, where it happened to even the Poster Child XP team.

XP's indifference to design is pretty astounding to anyone who's gone through any reasonable sized project. The theory is that you don't add anything more than you need at the moment. YAGNI (You Ain't Gonna Need It). And to a certain extent this is a good idea - if you're writing a small memory pool system, there's no need to turn it into a full blown memory manager 'just in case'.

But to use an XP example from the book, if you're working on an program that will need to work with objects on several different systems (local disk, database, web, ftp) but right now you're only got the disk based story card (user stories being broken up into small tasks) you hard code everything in your program to go right to the disk. Even though you know that you will need web support, because the customer insists on it, you are not allowed to plan for that whatsoever by adding a layer of abstraction between your code and the abstracted 'object holder'. Rather, when someone needs to add web support, they will just code it right in, maybe at least out in a separate web class. It will have a slightly different interface than the disk class, since there's almost no design, no planning, and different people coding it. Then later on you will refactor the code and merge these three or four different systems, make them behave the same, and clean up the code.

This is incredibly expensive and error prone for something that could have been avoided with even a little thought up front. You can say that any decent programmer would of course realize this was what was needed to be done, and add the abstraction layer. But you are no longer practicing XP. You made it needlessly complex for the moment, and added a requirement that might be removed.

There is no need for any large scale design in XP because it will naturally 'emerge' from continuous refactoring. As Kent Beck says, "The larger the scale, the more you must rely on emergence." You can treat a 10,000,000 transaction per second system as if it were a 1 transaction per second system. You write the 1 tps system, then the 10,000,000 tps system will just be 'refactored' from the 1 tps system when necessary. You don't need to worry about degenerative interactions between different parts of the system. You don't even need to worry about any error handling or out of bounds cases because that's not simplest possible design, until the customer codes up acceptance tests that trigger these. If you've been on a real project you're probably gasping for air now.

These next few points are points you can bring up with your management if they decide to do XP since they read a neat article about it somewhere. I know arguments that appeal to management aren't necessarily going to be seen as a good thing by coders, but if you've had some project experience they should make you break out in a cold sweat too.

An incredible burden is shifted to the 'customer' in eXtreme Programming. The customer (representative), in the room at all times, is responsible for expressing all the requirements in the form of short use stories (which can be jotted down on a card) and in the form of code, as acceptance tests. The customer is now responsible for everything, and if anything doesn't work, it's the customer's fault for not making their tests stringent enough. Given the extremely low likelihood that anyone is going to dedicate a senior designer/programmer to work with the XP team indefinitely, this tends to fall on someone more 'expendable'. Who is still expected to do a massive amount of work and know how to code and take all the responsibility for the project while having no real authority over the XP team that's implementing it. It should come as no surprise that this is a high stress, high burnout position and that the XP people are trying to 'refactor' this requirement constantly. Now ask your manager who the 'customer' is going to be.

Excellent management ammunition also comes in XP's total inability to deliver your requirements on time - it's quite up front about this. This seems a little strange for something that claims to make your development more rapid, but one set of XP gurus will tell you that XP can deliver by a fixed date, but not a known set of deliverables, and another will tell you that XP can deliver any fixed set of deliverables, but not by a known date. Which works out to be equivalent. Other methodologies often deliver late, but XP doesn't even try, and this is because XP totally punts any real design or scheduling. You can't tell how much emergence or refactoring it's going to take. Let's hear it in their own words:

"One of the most important principles in planning for Extreme Programming is that the dates are hard dates, but scope will vary.'" -- Kent Beck and Martin Fowler.

"There is a difference between 'Schedule' and 'The Schedule'. In XP, 'Schedule' is very important, but 'The Schedule' doesn't exist per se. ... The reality, of course, is that a software project is never done until it has been terminated." -- Robert C Martin

"Once you accept that scope is variable then suddenly the project is no longer about getting 'done'. Rather it's about developing at a certain velocity. And once you establish a velocity then the schedule becomes the customer's problem." -- Robert C Martin

My favorite quote in the whole book also comes from Robert C. Martin:

"If you lose a card, and if the customer does not detect that loss, then the card wasn't very important. If, however, at an interaction planning meeting, the customer says: 'Hay [sic], where's that card about blah, blah, blah,' you'll find it easy to recreate."

Did you get that? It's okay to drop customer requirements in the trash, and unless the customer remembers to code up an acceptance test checking that requirement... the joke's on him! The customer can request you do some documentation, any documentation, monsignor please, only by writing up a story card - how often do you think those get lost? And lest you think this is just a moment of weakness, XP Refactored supplies other quotes from XP gurus encouraging you to dink with the user story cards as it suits you. Summary

XP Refactored largely succeeds in the task to which it set itself: countering the hype of XP, or at least defanging it and making it sane. It won't make any difference to the fanatic adherents and their book empire, but this is an excellent guidebook if anyone tries to foist XP on you, or if you'd been making sideways glances at XP, curiously attracted as it batted its eyes at you. You can tell they had fun writing it, so it's mostly a fun read.

It could sorely use an executive summary chapter consisting of only the most compelling points with references, and please, no humor. For giving an executive to read when you're threatened with XP since he read about it somewhere.

Now I know people are going to read this and indignantly retort that XP is based on some good ideas, and I fully agree. XP's starting assumption, as explicitly stated by Kent Beck, is that if a little of something is good then as much of it as possible is even better. I like chocolate, but I'm not going to eat to exclusion. I further know people are going to respond 'But XP doesn't require you to _x_!', where _x_ is something like lack of design, or not planning ahead. This again is part of the cultlike beauty - you can claim any conflicting interpretation of the Rules you want. The primary advocates often do - Robert Martin says You Must Pair Program, Ron Jeffries says it's an ideal only, except where he says it's absolutely required, but if you fail then it's because you deviated from pure XP. Is that a little breathless? Well, no wonder.

XP Refactored really clarified my uneasiness with XP after reading the two XP books - first it simultaneously devalues real software engineering by providing justifications for ditching it all and treating programmers as commodity items. Secondly the horribly risky practices, combined with the incredible hype, seems to be setting us up for a return to crushingly restrictive, mind numbing waterfall methodologies when it shatters in the field like the fragile flower it is. As already happened at Chrysler, where even Smalltalk and the concept of Object Oriented were tarnished by association with the C3 project.

If you find yourself drawn to XP, as I was, I suggest you read Extreme Programming Explained, by Kent Beck, then this book. Hopefully you can read these and come away with a good idea of what works in XP and what doesn't. Perhaps you might feel the urge to unit test a bit more. Or do rapid release with at least some sane amount of design. Frankly, I got a better feel for the actual strengths of XP from Refactored than I did from any of the pro-XP books, including Explained. Which is pretty good for a book whose stated purpose is to deflate XP.

You can purchase Extreme Programming Refactored: The Case Against XP from bn.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.

Schart writes "My dad, an amateur astronomer/astrophotographer, sent me this link detailing the potential selling of Clyde Tombaugh (the man who discovered Pluto)'s backyard telescope. It features a 16 inch f/10 mirror which was hand-ground by the astronomer himself as well as a massive superstructure and 1-ton tube."

Schart writes "My dad, an amateur astronomer/astrophotographer, sent me this link detailing the potential selling of Clyde Tombaugh (the man who discovered Pluto)'s backyard telescope. It features a 16 inch f/10 mirror which was hand-ground by the astronomer himself as well as a massive superstructure and 1-ton tube."

floppy-less asks: "In nearly every modern GUI, the floppy disk icon is used to symbolize saving files. With the fate of floppy disks becoming apparent, what will become of the esteemed 'Save to Disk' icon? Will it become a CD-R? a hard drive? a portrait of Jesus?"

Bagels writes "A new article on MSNBC (coming originally from Space.com) reports that the both Rovers may have struck water in the form of brine. The Opportunity rover found hints of salty water in the trench that it dug, and scientists note that the Spirit rover is currently digging a trench of its own to investigate the soil that clings to its treads, suggesting the possibility of moisture. The brine would only be small amounts of water mixed with salt, which can exist in liquid form at very low temperatures. More images are available over at NASA's rover site." Reader frovingslosh would like to add: "I'm just hoping that when you get around to posting one of the many stories that the rover has found mud on Mars that you might include a link to the slashdot article where I predicted this but got moderated as 'funny'." Done!

A not-so-anonymous Anonymous Coward asks: "I've been considering opening up a CyberCafe for a while now, and I've been searching the web for cyber cafe websites. I've found several cybercafe databases, but was disappointed to find that a majority of the sites I found were either taken over by register-this-domain pages or hadn't been updated for a couple of years. Another Cyber/Gaming Cafe I found online announced today that they were closing. So are Cyber/Internet/Gaming cafes just another bubble the net will burst, or are they actually worth investing in? Any cafe owners with experience to point one way or the other? Where are the success stories?"

grendelkhan writes "Novell has released their latest correspondance with the litigous bastards ordering them to stop the lawsuit by noon tomorrow, and clarify what the SVRX licensing agreements with AT&T meant regarding derivative works. The letter quotes AT&T from the April '85 issue of $echo as stating that they 'claim no ownership interest in any portion of such a modification or derivative work.' So much for the ladder rung analogy." And reader highwaytohell links to today's CRN article in which Eben Moglen suggests that the SCO/Linux lawsuit cannot move ahead "until SCO resolves its dispute with Novell. And regardless of which company prevails in court, he said, customers won't have to pay any company for a license fee since both claimants--SCO and Novell--have distributed the Linux code under the GPL. Once again, SCO have no comment."

Performer Guy writes "This SCO press release indicates that they are offering a $250,000 reward for information leading to the arrest & conviction of the MyDoom DDoS worm authors. Let's hope they catch them. Not merely because MyDoom is one of the most mindless attacks on our internet infrastructure in memory, but also when they pay up it'll be less cash for SCO's litigation engine." Thanks to Tin Foil Hat and prostoalex for pointing out links at ComputerWorld and CNET, too. Related to this: stealth.c writes "Bruce Perens has written a letter to the Open Source community, discouraging us from cheering on the MyDOOM virus, as it would falsely implicate the FOSS communities and almost certainly cause the success of the virus writer's mission of discrediting these movements. This letter is also posted on NewsForge and on Groklaw." Unfortunately, with columns like this one blaming the worm on "some ticked-off Linux fan", it needs to be said.

Computerguy5 writes "According to a Consumer Electronics Association (CEA) study, released at this past Consumer Electronics Show (CES), women accounted for $55 billion of the $96 billion dollar market. 40 percent of women surveyed responded that they were treated better when accompanied by a man. CNN reports on the findings."

Bagels writes "'I had a big company, and he had a big company, and now we have a very big company.' This very appropriate Simpsons quote begins IGN's announcement regarding its imminent merger with GameSpy Industries, their former rival. GameSpy has its own announcement about this, as well. The official press release claims the companies' two websites will remain separate entities, and those websites will retain their original feel; the merger is mainly to pool the financial (and likely informational) resources of the two companies. The merger will be completed in the first half of 2004 - SpyGN, anyone?"

Rimbo writes "I've found a new hero, over at The Lurker Lounge's Diablo II forums, where intrepid adventurer MongoJerry set up an in-game Sorceress according to the following rules: 'No skill or stat points may ever be assigned... She plays fully naked, including no charms or jewelry... She must get all waypoints and fulfill all quests in game order... If she actually gets that far, any mercenary she gets must play naked as well... She plays hardcore.' So, no weapons, no armor, no magic items, no throwing potions. How long will she last playing Diablo II? Astonishingly long! Read on for the surprising Irene the Infirm: Tales of a Sickly Punching Sorceress."

An anonymous reader writes "The Debian Project, creators of the Debian GNU/Linux distribution, has voted to allow amendments to their Social Contract and Free Software Guidelines, as long as the developers agree with a 3:1 majority. The full text of the various amendments can be found in the original call for votes. Debian developer and XFree86 packager Branden Robinson has already proposed an amendment to the Social Contract that removes the requirement to maintain an archive for non-free software or "contrib" software (free software that depends on non-free software to work). Debian could still maintain this archive, but would no longer be required to do so. The proposal also updates the Social Contract to clearly require all works in Debian to meet the Debian Free Software Guidelines, not just software, which had come up repeatedly in the discussions over the non-free "GNU Free Documentation Licence". Both of these updates have been under consideration for some time, but were waiting on the ratification of the amendment procedure. The Debian Project voted on this amendment using their modified Condorcet voting procedure, which allows voters to rank the choices in order of preference, eliminating the "lesser of two evils" effect common to simple majority voting."

Tony Bybell writes "For the old school RPGamers, the 1980s Bard's Tale style of role playing is being unofficially resurrected as Bard's Legacy: Devil Whiskey. Check out the FAQ: a Linux port will be available immediately and they'll be releasing the code under an Open Source license after 50,000 copies of the full game have been sold." There's also a new downloadable demo available in both Windows and Linux flavors.

Slashback tonight brings updates on iTunes music sharing (the mentioned auction's been pulled), the continuing fight against software patents in Europe, the recently scuttled balloon-record attempt, and more. Read on for the details.

Your ruse, your clever trick. On August 22nd, we reported that OpenOffice.org's OS X version had been delayed for two years.

However, bluethundr writes "Hold the phone! Is it delayed or isn't it? Well, according to this story in the register, it AIN'T DELAYED...just undermanned. Apparently there are only TWO (count 'em! one...aw heck, where was I?) developers working on the OS X development team. Dan Williams (who is one of the two in question) says that 'the Mac version is in a Catch-22: with only two developers, it desperately needs man power. But no one will join the porting effort until they see momentum behind the Aqua port.' Maybe some of the coders among us could lend them a hand?"

Too late for the colonies, help save the mothership. leif.singer writes "While there still is some time left, please consider signing Eurolinux' petition against software patents in Europe." You'll be in good company: vinsci writes "In their news section, FFII has posted a more detailed story: "Within a few days, the petition calling the European Parliament to reject software patentability accumulated 50,000 new signatures.""

Free as in FreeDOS Jim Hall writes "I thought I'd submit this before the news item fell too far down our web page. If you remember about a year ago, Dell was to offer Windows-less PC's, instead pre-installing FreeDOS. You can now order a Dell with FreeDOS (or Linux) ... and have been for a while now. They are pretty nice machines, too (3.06GHz). We have the news item (with links to Dell) at the FreeDOS Project web site."

Nasty worms ought to at least produce spice. The NRC released an alert about worm infections and nuclear power plants. This is a reaction after the SQL-Slammer attacked the shut-down Davis-Besse nuclear power plant in January.

Tomorrow is another year. RoadKillian writes "New Scientist reports thats the QinetiQ 1, the record-breaking balloon which was supposed to rise to an altitude of 40km (131,000ft) has ripped during inflation. The weather is unlikely to permit another attempt this year."

When EULAs collide. Yesterday's story about selling a song downloaded from iTunes seems to have an unhappy ending: sideswipe76 writes "As I was watching this auction today, it approached $16,600! Now, if you try and check this link from eBay you get 'invalid item.' Is eBay wussing out just to avoid any legal snafus that _might_ occur? Or did he violate some ebay policy? Thoughts?"

Pirogoeth writes "Scientists have taken seedlings from the world's oldest tree, a 4,768-year-old bristlecone pine named Methuselah, and plan on plan on altering them to make them clones of the ancient tree. Their goal is to study them to find the secret of their longevity and to see if cloned trees can survive in different climates."

Linda writes "GamerDad looks at the 'Madden Curse' for those featured on the front cover of the videogame, year by year, and talks about how it might have come a bit early this year: 'Sports fans know about the Sports Illustrated cover curse (athletes that grace the cover tend to get hurt, really bad, a lot) but a lesser known curse is the one caused by EA Sports' powerhouse Madden franchise. It began just a few years ago when EA took the big lug himself off the cover.'" There's another good synopsis of previous cover stars' woes at the AJC.com site, after Mike Vick of the Atlanta Falcons, this year's star, broke his leg at the weekend.

KReilly asks: "As the school year starts back up for me, I have been looking for a volunteer program I could work in. This year I have been considering creating my own non-profit organization, but I still lack a clear picture of what I hope to accomplish. I have read about communities wiring classrooms for the internet in California, and repairing computers donated by businesses for schools. I would like to do this, but find many schools and libraries would deny this donation since its maintenance would be too big of an investment for them and they do not want to experiment with Open Source alternatives that would lower the PC repair cost. So my question to you is how do you, as a tech, give back to society and aid in social programs? And, any information/advice you wanted to share on my original idea would be much appreciated."

Slashback tonight brings you updates on low-power hardware, unauthorized music distribution by buymusic.com, and more, including a reminder of the upcoming (now annual) Linux picnic at the conclusion of LWCE. (If you're not there, start your own local chapter ;)) Read on for more!

MenuetOS progresses. For those with a taste for esoteric tiny operating systems for low-power systems, the x86 release of Contiki wasn't the only news this week. Lgd writes "Menuet, the 100 % assembly OS, has made quite a few improvements since it was last reported at Slashdot. Menuet has now a simple tcp/ip stack with tiny http, mp3 and email servers, FASM 1.48 assembler and demo applications like the 3d maze."

Perhaps this will lead to a finer toothed comb overall. Jody Whitesides writes "Hello, I want to take a moment to update you about my situation that you posted recently... As of right now, I won my fight with BuyMusic and the Orchard. I have been promptly let out of a contract that was already terminated February 1st of 2001. It seems they had kept me in their catalog on a contract clause that had been overlooked when the contract was signed back in 1999.

As of 5 p.m. pst 07/31/2003 I was given notice that I was removed from the Orchard's distribution. In turn I have since checked with BuyMusic's website and have been swiftly removed from the website and now all has been set right in the world. It seems that even the big corporations don't wish to face copyright infringement.

I want to thank you for running the story as I have no doubt that it helped bring a swift decision in getting my music under my control so that I can best determine how fans will get it into their hands.

I harbor no ill will towards BuyMusic or the Orchard."

MandrakeSoft still not dead (wants to go for a walk). LinuxGeek8 writes "In their latest shareholder newsletter MandrakeSoft made a few statements about their financial position. Their retail sales decreased, while their high-margin sales (oem, club, online sales, etc.) increased. In total their revenue decreased somewhat, while the operating loss decreased. Since January they have been cash-flow positive.

Quoting about their "Chapter 11": "On January 27th, 2003, the Commercial Court granted MandrakeSoft a six month observation and protection period (similar to a U.S. Chapter 11 procedure). This period will end on July 27th, 2003. The company is pursuing an opportunity to be granted an additional six month observation and protection period. In the upcoming months, the company's objective is to exit the Observation Period with a 'Continuation Plan'."
Things seem to be looking good on the radar."

This is good news for those of us who like all the work that Mandrake has put into making Free software easy to install.

Video Capturing Part 2 at Ars Technica miskatonic alumnus writes "Recently, slashdot reported on an excellent article -- Part I: Video Capture -- of the 3-part series 'Guide to Capturing, Cleaning & Compressing Video' at Ars Technica. At last, Part II: Video Cleaning is now available."

The largest gathering, of a sort. Linda Denison links to these "several articles about GenCon, handily linked to one place!"

From the article: 'GenCon: Freaks & Geeks,' she excerpts: 'My wife wrinkled her nose in response. Computer geeks tend to be clean. They wear clean clothes, and bathe regularly. Usually this is because they live in their mother's house. Probably in their old room. Tabletop geeks tend to wear the same clothes they bought in their early twenties, roughly three belt sizes ago, and aren't well versed in the bathing arts. This is because they live in their mother's basement. The heat sort of exacerbated this problem.'

(We've run a couple of articles originating at this year's GenCon already.)

Sci-Fi Auction Followup... cjustus writes "The live auction mentioned earlier in the week is over... Here are the prices that items went for. The big item? Original George Reeves Superman Costume for $110K ... Harrison Ford's pistol from Blade Runner went for $17K... Any slashdotters bid / win?"

Matching hardware to actual needs is not crazytalk. Michael C. Barnes writes with a followup to the recent mention of his company's low-power MicroServer, which, it turns out, has a larger sibling. "One of the people reading your post did a review of the Microserver HP. ... The person doing the review benchmarked our Microserver High Performance and thought it did a reasonably good job with My SQL."

"Penguin dip" is just an expression. Bill Kendrick writes "This Saturday, August 9th (after the Linux World Expo) San Francisco Bay Area Linux lovers and the people who love them will be gathering at the Baylands Park in Sunnyvale for Picn*x12, the third annual Linux anniversary picnic. Organized by several local LUGs and sponsored by Oracle, this barbecue is a free event for the entire family."

Whether or not you can get to the picnic, FeeDBaCK writes "It has been almost 2 years since the Linux Counter has been mentioned on Slashdot. It was last mentioned in October of 2001 and brought on an impressive number of registrations. Accounts are deleted after 2 years of inactivity, so now is a good time for everyone to freshen up their account, or create a new one if they don't have one already."

plotdot writes "When motorists drive across Kansas with its expansive, fertile fields of grain, they most often observe that the state is flat as a pancake. Now, three scientists have proved that observation wrong. The May/June issue of Annals of Improbable Research (AIR) carries a story by Mark Fonstad, William Pugatch, and Brandon Vogt proving that Kansas is actually flatter than a pancake."

Gedvondur writes "The story ran in the WSJ today, that the Gates-owned image company, Corbis, is suing Amazon.com for copyright violations (PDF link). Apparently the suit was without warning to Amazon. Amazon will use the DMCA to defend itself. Link goes to copy of the WSJ article on Corbis's site."

nychef asks: "My school has decided to give me money to set up a server for my club. I'll be running e-mail for about 250 people, and webpages for about 100 which will mostly be static webpages, but there will be a few dynamic ones. I am trying to figure out just how powerful I need the hardware to be. They gave me a pretty decent budget, but my budget is to include the internet line. So I want to maximize bandwidth and minimize the cost of the server. I am looking in the range of dual P4 2.8's with a 3 disk RAID5 stack and 1 GB of ram. Is this adequate or overkill?" nychef has a budget of about $4,000. What kind of hardware and bandwidth options do you think he can afford?

Sayten241 writes "Wired is running an article about a program from UC Berkeley in which website developers can literally sketch out a webpage using a tablet. The article states that Berkley felt that since so many web-developers sketch things out on paper before they begin, why not allow them to sketch on the computer? This program is not limited to websites however. It has also been used to help MIT design a Linux Interface (click the blue parts of the image to navigate through interface)."

WizardX asks: "At my new job we are in the process of starting to Do Things Right(tm). One of these things is putting the computer room (where the IT staff also resides), on its own cooling circuit. We want to monitor and track the temp and humidity in the room. The tracking part makes it more difficult. I really am not familiar with devices to do this. I plan on monitoring with MRTG, so a device that could plug into our network would be nice, but as long as it can dump the data to a computer (*nix or Windows, I really don't care) I will be happy. What have you seen or used?" I think the submitter is looking for something along the line of these devices, but maybe some of you have run into something better?

tsetem writes "Over on ExtremeTech, they have a write-up on building your own Linux Media Jukebox for a little over $500 and a bit of elbow-grease. This is probably the PC we were hoping that the Lindows Media PC would've been." This particular project uses Freevo which has matured significantly since I last looked at it.

A not-so Anonymous Coward asks: "After being on a rather slow PC for some time now, I have finally made the jump to a 1GHz+ PC. Being fairly new at having a rather fast PC, I am not very sure where to go for system performance tweaking. A few friends pointed me to Monroe World and TweakXP. Both are pretty good sites, however I find that my system still doesn't perform as well as it should when running a benchmarking test like 3dMark 2003. My score is just under 2000. I know people who have slower systems than mine and get a score around 5000. So I am turning to the Slashdot community to ask: Where do you go to find out the latest and greatest hardware and system tweaks? Do you have your own tweaks, and if you do would you mind sharing your secret tweaking tips?"

Slashback with corrections and updates on backyard coasters, the Associated Press' (not CNN's) interview with Steinhardt, Open Source and Free software in India, the Kartoo visual search engine, how you too can assemble some pulsating glassy spheres. Read on for those details and more.

Attribution where due. Frank Bajak, Technology Editor for The Associated Press, wrote with a correction to last week's post "CNN Talks WIth ACLU Tech Maven Barry Steinhardt," writing "CNN didn't speak to Steinhardt. We, The Associated Press, did. CNN merely posted our story." Thanks for pointing that out.

If it's an orb, it had better do some glowing! shakes writes "Since the recent outbreak of interest in the Ambient Orb, I took a moment to homebrew one using a PICchip. The source code is currently incomplete as it does not support serial communication, but that will come in the next day or so."

Please secure the locking safety mechanism, or call an attendant if you have trouble. BoomZilla writes "I was intrigued with the home made roller coaster report on Slashdot last year. Just the sort of thing I *need* for the kids. Problem was that I had neither the skill nor the time to build such a beast. I've recently become re-inspired by the Back Yard Roller Coaster site. It's short on details (just a few pictures and a video) - but long on firing up my enthusiasm. Straightforward design. Easy construction. Modest cost. All I need is a hill (check) and the patience and understanding of my wife (stand by for news on that...)"

Oooh, look at the pictures. The visually intriguing meta search engine Kartoo is now more accessable to flash-poor browsers (and lazy or stubborn flash-avoiding users). Alexandre Dos Santos writes "Kartoo now offers an alternative to the regular flash display. The html version is only in beta. It offers the same functionality as the flash version, i.e. you can add or subtract keywords. It's obviously an attempt at reaching out to users who are on machines without flash, or very slow connections.

The option to use html only had been there before, but now Kartoo seems to push this more to the front...and important point...Without sponsored links."

Keeping their options open, or closing doors? bigmase521 writes "LinuxWorld has an article with statements from the Minister of Information Technology and Communications of India stating that India is NOT going to support Open Source alternatives Government-Wide. However, different branches of the government are still considering open source as their primary computing solutions. So I guess unfortunately, it seems as if Mr. Gates' Bribe err 'heartfelt visit' may have worked after all."

Slashback with corrections and updates on backyard coasters, the Associated Press' (not CNN's) interview with Steinhardt, Open Source and Free software in India, the Kartoo visual search engine, how you too can assemble some pulsating glassy spheres. Read on for those details and more.

Attribution where due. Frank Bajak, Technology Editor for The Associated Press, wrote with a correction to last week's post "CNN Talks WIth ACLU Tech Maven Barry Steinhardt," writing "CNN didn't speak to Steinhardt. We, The Associated Press, did. CNN merely posted our story." Thanks for pointing that out.

If it's an orb, it had better do some glowing! shakes writes "Since the recent outbreak of interest in the Ambient Orb, I took a moment to homebrew one using a PICchip. The source code is currently incomplete as it does not support serial communication, but that will come in the next day or so."

Please secure the locking safety mechanism, or call an attendant if you have trouble. BoomZilla writes "I was intrigued with the home made roller coaster report on Slashdot last year. Just the sort of thing I *need* for the kids. Problem was that I had neither the skill nor the time to build such a beast. I've recently become re-inspired by the Back Yard Roller Coaster site. It's short on details (just a few pictures and a video) - but long on firing up my enthusiasm. Straightforward design. Easy construction. Modest cost. All I need is a hill (check) and the patience and understanding of my wife (stand by for news on that...)"

Oooh, look at the pictures. The visually intriguing meta search engine Kartoo is now more accessable to flash-poor browsers (and lazy or stubborn flash-avoiding users). Alexandre Dos Santos writes "Kartoo now offers an alternative to the regular flash display. The html version is only in beta. It offers the same functionality as the flash version, i.e. you can add or subtract keywords. It's obviously an attempt at reaching out to users who are on machines without flash, or very slow connections.

The option to use html only had been there before, but now Kartoo seems to push this more to the front...and important point...Without sponsored links."

Keeping their options open, or closing doors? bigmase521 writes "LinuxWorld has an article with statements from the Minister of Information Technology and Communications of India stating that India is NOT going to support Open Source alternatives Government-Wide. However, different branches of the government are still considering open source as their primary computing solutions. So I guess unfortunately, it seems as if Mr. Gates' Bribe err 'heartfelt visit' may have worked after all."

Anonymous Coward writes "The headline just about says it all on this one. A physics grad student in the UK has come up with the mathematical formula for how to flip a pancake and have it land correctly back in the pan. The BBC has the details."

brarrr writes "I'm starting out in graduate school at the UW in Materials Science and Engineering and doing research on spin electronics. Results from this work have me searching for a Mac OS X plotting/graphing program for 2D data and there are many of them, but no useful comparison anywhere. What do you use? What do you recommend? Why? My uses will include plotting, presentation, curve fit, trendline analysis, and more. I've looked briefly at: pro Fit, gnuplot (difficult to use, not very professional output), Abscissa (site is down, cannot evaluate), SmileLab (not very robust), Tecplot, IGOR (so far the best looking, but expensive), and KaleidaGraph (difficult to use, feels poorly ported). So what works/doesn't work? And don't bother saying Excel...."

groovemaneuver asks: "I've managed to get a working OpenLDAP directory running on my network. Linux, Windows, and Apple boxes are all happily authenticating. I have imported the 'apple.schema' file to the LDAP server from one of my Macs, but I cannot seem to find any info on the proper syntax for the various apple schema attributes. Anyone have any idea where one could find this? This is the one obstacle keeping my network from having a single source of authentication, and I'm sure this info would be useful to more than just myself. Thanks!"

tabdelgawad writes "Well, not quite, but according to Jay A. Samit, senior vice president for new media at music label EMI Group PLC, quoted in this Washington Post article, "This is huge. This is the largest growth area for music companies and our artists". The article goes on to prove two facts we already know: that the music industry is greedy (already asking for a bigger slice of this pie!) and that the porn industry is a prime innovator in marketing and technology :-)"

tabdelgawad writes "The Washington Post has a mostly speculative article on the effects of John McCain (R-AR) replacing Ernest 'Fritz' Hollings (D-SC) as chairman of the powerful senate Commerce Committee. Topics in the article include the future of pending broadband and copyright legislation as well as the Senate's relationship with the FCC. Best quote from the article belongs to ITAA president Harris Miller: 'If Jack Valenti had been around at the time of Gutenberg he would have organized the monks to come and burn down the printing press' :-)."

slashdotess writes "Information Week reports: "About a year ago, Patrick McCartney, a Johnson Center project manager, created a Linux desktop environment that could also run government-mandated Microsoft apps. This let his team of 30 engineers continue to program in a Unixlike environment and create Word documents and Outlook E-mail all on the same PC. This mixed-use scenario is slowly taking hold, encouraged by a growing number of applications for running Linux on PC desktops." Score another one for Linux on the Desktop."