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Full Disclosure: I work at Wiley and have done work on eGrade Plus, so I am biased.

In the past year, we've launched eGrade Plus here at Wiley which is a full course management system which a professor can choose to adopt along with one of our textbooks for his or her class. It is not Open Source though we do run it on Linux servers and used a lot of open source tools for development. I used WebCT in college a couple years ago for a few of my classes and have worked with other educational products from the back end since then, but eGrade Plus is at least a generation ahead of most of these (though I too am also very interested in Sakai and have actually been messing around with it recently on a development server).

eGrade Plus is entirely web-based and runs on our servers, but the customers are assigned to domains over which they have a lot of control. We provide a large library of question banks and default assignments for each textbook, but the professor is free to make new questions, alter or create new assignments, and generally to customize the course as much as is desired.

As we make more courses to go with more of our titles, the feature set has been expanding. For our Calculus and Physics titles, we've integrated Maple into the backend to support complex symbolic notation for calculating and entering answers by whatever mathematical method the student uses to arrive at them. There's lots of pretty cool stuff we're experimenting with here based on our own ideas and feedback from our customers, most of which has been very positive.

As I mentioned before, it is not open source. Furthermore, it is only offered for use with our textbooks. Having said that, it is very very tightly integrated with our textbooks -- each registered student has access to a full electronic version of the textbook (as well as many eGP-only supplements) which is cross-referenced with all the other assignments, questionbanks, concept demos and other supplements through their domain.

While eGrade Plus does come with the textbook we also allow and encourage students who don't like to keep their textbooks after the semester is over to purchase a registration code for eGrade Plus only instead of buying a hard copy of the book. You will have semester-long access to the electronic version of the full text for considerably less than the cost of the hard copy and with some extra features to boot.

Finally, eGrade Plus can be integrated with Blackboard and WebCT if that's what your college ends up adopting in the end (just thought that was worth a mention). If you're interested in reading even more, go here.

Anyway, good luck finding the right solution, I'm very interested in some of the other links I've seen posted here too. Sorry if I sounded too much like a not-too-slick marketing droid -- sales pitches aren't really my department, I'm just a code monkey interested in this stuff only partially because it's my job.

Full Disclosure: I work at Wiley and have done work on eGrade Plus, so I am biased.

In the past year, we've launched eGrade Plus here at Wiley which is a full course management system which a professor can choose to adopt along with one of our textbooks for his or her class. It is not Open Source though we do run it on Linux servers and used a lot of open source tools for development. I used WebCT in college a couple years ago for a few of my classes and have worked with other educational products from the back end since then, but eGrade Plus is at least a generation ahead of most of these (though I too am also very interested in Sakai and have actually been messing around with it recently on a development server).

eGrade Plus is entirely web-based and runs on our servers, but the customers are assigned to domains over which they have a lot of control. We provide a large library of question banks and default assignments for each textbook, but the professor is free to make new questions, alter or create new assignments, and generally to customize the course as much as is desired.

As we make more courses to go with more of our titles, the feature set has been expanding. For our Calculus and Physics titles, we've integrated Maple into the backend to support complex symbolic notation for calculating and entering answers by whatever mathematical method the student uses to arrive at them. There's lots of pretty cool stuff we're experimenting with here based on our own ideas and feedback from our customers, most of which has been very positive.

As I mentioned before, it is not open source. Furthermore, it is only offered for use with our textbooks. Having said that, it is very very tightly integrated with our textbooks -- each registered student has access to a full electronic version of the textbook (as well as many eGP-only supplements) which is cross-referenced with all the other assignments, questionbanks, concept demos and other supplements through their domain.

While eGrade Plus does come with the textbook we also allow and encourage students who don't like to keep their textbooks after the semester is over to purchase a registration code for eGrade Plus only instead of buying a hard copy of the book. You will have semester-long access to the electronic version of the full text for considerably less than the cost of the hard copy and with some extra features to boot.

Finally, eGrade Plus can be integrated with Blackboard and WebCT if that's what your college ends up adopting in the end (just thought that was worth a mention). If you're interested in reading even more, go here.

Anyway, good luck finding the right solution, I'm very interested in some of the other links I've seen posted here too. Sorry if I sounded too much like a not-too-slick marketing droid -- sales pitches aren't really my department, I'm just a code monkey interested in this stuff only partially because it's my job.

Operating System Concepts (and Operating System Concepts with Java) are both great books. However, I think Gary Nutt's Operating Systems is actually even better. I found it easier to read (or maybe I've gotten better... it was a while since I read OSC). Nutt's book has a lot of interesting lab exercises at the end of each chapter that you can do either on Windows or Unix/Linux. I found this really helps you understand and remember the concepts.

This appendix on Mach is from the newest edition of the classic "Operating System Concepts," Seventh Edition by Silberschatz, Galvin, and Gagne (Wiley). ISBN: 0-471-69466-5. Published December 2004.

There are also free online chapters for FreeBSD and Nachos.

Link to Wiley's purchase page (given that we are /. them): http://www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd -0471694665.html

Did Wiley want to sell it in Apple stores (even that would have been, at most, a bit weird) ? With all respect to Apple's hardware and software products, such an action as banning the entire publishing house from stores sound absurdly inappropriate.

Check for yourself the sample chapter at least, to see whether it's such an outrageous book or not.

Here are the other Hibernate books I've read (or skimmed):

Hibernate: A Developer's Notebook
Hibernate: A J2EE Developer's Guide (Addison Wesley))
Java Open Source Programming: with XDoclet, JUnit, WebWork, Hibernate

But they all fall short of Hibernate in Action imho.

On a somewhat related note, I've found this website to be invaluable when dealing with avalanches of acronyms.

Full Text in Advanced Materials
I love that you can always find the USA today equivalent on slashdot, but never anything more in depth, doesnt this site cater to nerds?

Race is not a social construct. That is a common fallacy. Genetics and statistics show otherwise. I suggest you read this: Edwards, AW (2003). Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy Bioessays 25, 798-801.

It is well known to neurologists that significant differences exist in the brain. Just because you can list social factors as having a part in this, it does not follow that neurological differences do not have an influence.

A problem only arises when this is used to stereotype applicants based on their sex, which is fallacious since there is much variation among members of a given sex. When looking at populations to formulate policies, however, one needs to acknowledge these differences, because they can at least partially explain some of the discrepancies in numbers between sexes at given positions.

A good analogy can be found in the issue of race. The politically correct thinking goes something like this: race is a social construct, therefore discrepancies between races in academic and other positions are due to racism, and so we need affirmative action. But what does the science say? One often hears that variations among individuals of an ethnicity are greater than those between ethnicities, so this would seem to support the above. However, let's take a closer look with statistics: Edwards, AW (2003). Human genetic diversity: Lewontin's fallacy Bioessays 25, 798-801. A quote from the abstract: "most of the information that distinguishes populations is hidden in the correlation structure of the data and not simply in the variation of the individual factors." Differences between the sexes are even greater.

Well, there is an iPod for dummies...

The redeeming quality of weed is that its users feel less capable of things like driving than they actually are. Drivers that are only mildly stoned are usually overly defensive in traffic and drive too slow.

The effect of alcohol is the opposite, and the effect of alcohol and weed combined is apparently even worse. No sane person combines alcohol with any other drug or psychoactive medicin anyway. Alcohol very seriously impairs judgment, while weed impairs performance.

High doses (> 300 ng/kg) of THC cause performance problems similar to those of 0.08 > BAC > 0.05 (common legal limits for blood alcohol of drivers). These doses are however higher than most regular recreational users prefer to use (in the Netherlands; not in combination with alcohol).

As someone from the netherlands all you say is a complete and utter lie.

Wtf is that supposed to mean?

Did you know that Dutch traffic is among the safest of the world (3rd)?

Have you ever used weed?

Regularly. Have you tried finding out what the right dose is for you? Have you used it while being sober?

Do you drive while tired or under the influence of painkillers? Do you use the phone while driving? Do you talk to passengers while driving?

read the history of maine lobster.

Crackers are an ingenious lot, and security holes are security holes are security holes. They WILL be exploited in linux sooner or later.

Will be exploited? Download the metasploit framework sometime; there are more exploits for Linux than for Solaris or Windows. But this is where the guy's point becomes important: because of how Windows deals with security tokens (here is a good place to start if you're curious), any exploit that gains access can probably execute code in the SYSTEM context.

So, of the Linux exploits that are trivially available to exploit, none can reliably execute arbitrary system code, while all of the Windows exploits can. That's not this one guy's opinion, that's just how the operating systems work.

I'd love something like Apple's Finder column-view for searching Google's Directory.

2 articles:
Applicability of discovery science approach to determine biological effects of mobile phone radiation
Proteomics analysis of human endothelial cell line EA.hy926 after exposure to GSM 900 radiation

2 articles:
Applicability of discovery science approach to determine biological effects of mobile phone radiation
Proteomics analysis of human endothelial cell line EA.hy926 after exposure to GSM 900 radiation

Meant to say:
Yup, by 2 years.

Yup, by .

Batch pigging

Maybe you should read Applied Cryptography if you want to create new cryptography protocols.

Step 2 of your protocol can be intercepted quite easily (crypto in current cell phone is pretty weak and you need a way to transmit securely between your computer and the SMS gateway).

In the book you will also find that real security is made of three things : authentication, privacy, non-repudiation. The protocol you defined is only related authentication.

He's probably spoiled. Windows provides a consistent, logical and easy to understand control panel which makes it especially easy to install and configure new hardware. That, and the fact that a pink elephant ate my grandma, makes me prefer Windows XP.

Well, first the disclaimer - I know nothing about this project that I will link to, but was pretty interested in the same thing.

I've written a bunch of book reviews, including those on Slashdot, and some publishers are sending me now catalogs with upcoming titles as part of their reviewing program.

So, anyway, Wiley has this book with the robot kit, that they plan the next edition of some time this September, although the publisher told me before that the deadline might move into the future. I have not read the previous edition, nor have I played with it.

It seems to have received brilliant reviews on Amazon for that 1999 edition, so I'd suggest just perusing it and maybe buying the book+kit used if it's in buildable condition (i.e. not the robot that is already all built, polished, given guns and ammo, and right now just needs the ON switch to be turned).

One-step checkout in the 19th century, why the very idea!

Picked up a book by Chistopher Negus and Chuck Wolber published by Wiley Tecnology Publishing called Linux Toys They do the same thing with an old laptop - something you can pickup for less than $100

I work testing desktop app integration, and a very good book I've seen that's quite accessible to the beginner is Testing Computer Software by Kaner, Falk, and Nguyen. I bought it and passed it around our lab just for the first few chapters which deal with the mindset behind software testing, such as why even bother testing when you can't assure 100% bug-free code. Later chapters cover how to effectively log bugs, how to test things besides actual code (devices, localization, manuals, etc.), and an overview of how to manage a software testing team. From experience, I can tell you that not 100% will be applicable to the particular job you're about to start, but it will meet your "get me in the mindset" requirement.

Yep. This is old news. The oldest reference I have come across is 1999 (near the bottom).

Small picture in second page of pdf file.

Bit more info

Paper writen on technology used (reg required)

The same guy has also been involved in wearable keyboards which uses finger rings to detect finger movement and 10Mb indoor network that uses human bodies as portable ethernet cables. Masaaki Fukumoto is a busy man.

Damn! This book must have been a complete waste of time for all those well paid people to read then.

I recently just finished reading All the Shah's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror by Stephen Kinzer and I must say it's been quite an eye-opener. Basically, the Brits lost their oil in Iran because a democratic leader realized that it was his own country's oil, not someone else. So GB had the US use the CIA to incite a coup and remove a democratically appointed, economically minded, leader to get their oil supply back. In his place, we put in a fundamentalist islamic leader who has become a model for other islamic groups (read: Taliban). That was the first of several "regime replacements" -- some might argue that the recent war against Iraq was not much more than this...

http://www.wiley.com/college/phy/halliday320005/pd f/leidenfrost_essay.pdf

Jearl Walker explains the Leidenfrost Effect. It even has a nice picture of him after dipping his hand in the lead.

This is also included with the physics textbook which he authored with Halliday and Resnick (so others from OSU and maybe other uni's will recognize it.

The tooth guy would be Jearl Walker @ Cleveland State University, I believe. See here (PDF) for details.

A bunch of people have been commenting on the professor who used to gargle LN2. The man's name was Jearl Walker, author of The Flying Circus of Physics, who published an excellent essay describing exactly how to do it. He also talks about dipping your hand in molten lead, as well as walking on fire. He is the one who mentioned that when you let the LN2 touch your teeth, they crack.

IMHO any information security professional needs to develop a professional paranoia, being thoughtful of potential risks and failures, and understand what might go wrong.

Reading Bruce Schneier's Secrets and Lies is a really good start in this area. It is a not very technical book, written at the level suitable for an IT manager. This is also useful to help explains risks, vulnerabilities, and failures to IT Management.

The ever so ugly covered Hacking Exposed, which explains the basics of what criminals (or attackers) do commonly to gain unauthorized access to (networked) computer systems. This is so you a) know how easy it is, and b) are familiar with an overview of the basic steps and techniques to gain illicit access.

For online resources, RISKS digest (not focused on malicious activities, but how systems fail - very insightful and low volume), and Bugtraq a full disclosure mailing list will show you recent exploits, and vuln notices, but it is fairly lacking in actual educational content, and there are several other mailing lists at SecurityFocus that could also be useful to developing professional paranoia.

Next you need the language and basics of information/computer security. For this textbooks like Computer Security by Dieter Gollmann, Information Security Management Handbook by Tipton and Krause, Practical Unix & Internet Security by Simson Garfinkel, Gene Spafford, Alan Schwartz, and Security in Computing by Pfleeger and Pfleeger.

For procedures look at CISSP study material, BS 7799 / ISO 17799, and security auditing and incident handling materials. Some knowledge of risk management can also be useful.

From these basics, of the right mindset, the common language of infosec, and procedures and policy you can get into the low-level details of firewalls, VPNs, IDS, and network design. For this you should have a good network/internetworking basics, a very detailed understanding of TCP/IP, and understand firewalls, VPNs, and IPsec.

Firewalls and Internet Security: Repelling the Wily Hacker, 2nd ed. by William R. Cheswick, Steven M. Bellovin, and Aviel D. Rubin is a great place to start, and Building Internet Firewalls by Elizabeth D. Zwicky, Simon Cooper, D. Brent Chapman is a great follow-up. An alternative book on firewalls and VPNs is Inside Network Perimeter Security: The Definitive Guide to Firewalls, VPNs, Routers, and Intrusion Detection Systems by Stephen Northcutt, Karen Frederick, Scott Winters, Lenny Zeltser, Ronald W. Ritchey (crowd from SANS).

For networking basics, a Cisco certification like CCNA could useful in providing knowledge about internetworking and Cisco router's IOS. For the gory details of TCP/IP either TCP/IP Illustrated: Volume 1: The Protocols by Richard Stevens or Internetworking With TCP/IP Volume 1: Principles Protocols, and Architecture, 4th edition by Douglas Comer.

For IDS - Network Intrusion Detection: An Analyst's Handbook by Stephen Northcutt and Intrusion Signatures and Analysis by Matt Fearnow, Stephen Northcutt, Karen Frederick, Mark Cooper are the best IMHO.

I am not sure what to recommend for VPNs, other than you need to know about IPsec.

• Cohen-Tannoudji: very comprehensive, but perhaps overwhelming due to its heft/cost. Heavy into Dirac (bra-ket) notation.
• Landau: requires the most calculus, lots left as "an exercise to the reader"
• Sakurai: Probably the best place to start if you want an in depth yet introductory course.

But it really depends on YOU, I for one could only learn scattering from Landau, but found the book less than perfect for many other topics. Others in my class had quite the opposite reaction. It depends on what "clicks" for you, and how deep you want to go into what topics.

Balam

• Security Engineering
• Secrets and Lies
• Building Open Source Network Security Tools: Components and Techniques
• Troubleshooting Campus Networks: Practical Analysis of Cisco and LAN Protocols/
• Mastering UNIX Shell Scripting
• Implementing Intrusion Detection Systems: A Hands-On Guide for Securing the Network

I'll believe in the second edition of HAR when I see it.

Helevius

• Security Engineering
• Secrets and Lies
• Building Open Source Network Security Tools: Components and Techniques
• Troubleshooting Campus Networks: Practical Analysis of Cisco and LAN Protocols/
• Mastering UNIX Shell Scripting
• Implementing Intrusion Detection Systems: A Hands-On Guide for Securing the Network

I'll believe in the second edition of HAR when I see it.

Helevius

• Security Engineering
• Secrets and Lies
• Building Open Source Network Security Tools: Components and Techniques
• Troubleshooting Campus Networks: Practical Analysis of Cisco and LAN Protocols/
• Mastering UNIX Shell Scripting
• Implementing Intrusion Detection Systems: A Hands-On Guide for Securing the Network

I'll believe in the second edition of HAR when I see it.

Helevius

• Security Engineering
• Secrets and Lies
• Building Open Source Network Security Tools: Components and Techniques
• Troubleshooting Campus Networks: Practical Analysis of Cisco and LAN Protocols/
• Mastering UNIX Shell Scripting
• Implementing Intrusion Detection Systems: A Hands-On Guide for Securing the Network

I'll believe in the second edition of HAR when I see it.

Helevius

• Security Engineering
• Secrets and Lies
• Building Open Source Network Security Tools: Components and Techniques
• Troubleshooting Campus Networks: Practical Analysis of Cisco and LAN Protocols/
• Mastering UNIX Shell Scripting
• Implementing Intrusion Detection Systems: A Hands-On Guide for Securing the Network

I'll believe in the second edition of HAR when I see it.

Helevius

• Security Engineering
• Secrets and Lies
• Building Open Source Network Security Tools: Components and Techniques
• Troubleshooting Campus Networks: Practical Analysis of Cisco and LAN Protocols/
• Mastering UNIX Shell Scripting
• Implementing Intrusion Detection Systems: A Hands-On Guide for Securing the Network

I'll believe in the second edition of HAR when I see it.

Helevius

It's the best book on the topic available.

Actually, I beg to differ. Security Engineering by Dr Ross Anderson is IMHO a far more rigorous treatment of this subject. Details are here. It's even just as easy to read as Schneiers book...Of course, Bruce is a far better at self marketting.

I am looking forward to getting Schneiers new Practical Cryptography book though (here).

I've been dabbling with RH8 and SuSE 8.1 for a while now and I've found the Linux Bible to be a very useful desktop reference. Just my two cents.

Those black and yellow books are good.
Those orange and white ones will also do. :p

don't give your credit card number to ANYONE who calls you, don't open attachments from people you don't know, use an updated virus scanner, patch the latest discovered holes in your OS, use a firewall...

...and read The Art of Deception by Kevin Mitnick.

sPh

"While the type of computer work the study participants performed varied considerably, as did the size of the computer used and the work environment, "it should be emphasized that even under such working conditions, our results were extremely consistent over a 3-year period," Nakazawa and colleagues note."

Or maybe they went to the city and got themselves a puter and a book, windows for dummies cliff notes edition

The FOR DUMMIES® series books and the CLIFFS NOTES® series books are published by the same publisher. Thus, in a way, all FOR DUMMIES® books can be considered CLIFFS NOTES® edition.

Brought to you by DORD. Buy DORD stuff at ThinkGeek

Wouldn't a bunch of faxes be harder to ignore....say some fax blasting? Since email is easy to delete?

Wiley Corp Fax (800) 597-3299

Fax number is listed at the bottom of the page ... HERE

Let them hear it

Maybe not 2000 degrees but:

http://www.wiley.com/college/phy/halliday320005/pd f/leidenfrost_essay.pdf