The main reason is that +- 10 years ago, O'Reilly's books were great and Wrox and Sams were unknown (did they exist?). Nowadays, O'Reilly's lineup has been diluted by a long list of mediocre titles, and there are a lot of other good publishers of tech books.
The Pragmatic Programmer, from Journeyman to Master: guide to being a professional software developer, covers a lot
Code Complete: how to craft a little bit of code; stuff like naming, indentation, etc. I read the 2nd edition which was great, the 3rd is reputed to be better.
Refactoring: giving a name to "improving existing code little by little", something we do every day; I found this a much more accessible first book to get into "High Church OO" than, say, Design Patterns.
Other:
Great Mambo Chicken and the Transhuman Condition: enthusiastic stories about scientific hubris
The Making of the Atomic Bomb: good history
The Colossal Book of Short Puzzles and Problems: got this as a birthday present, it's brilliant
Fiction by Neil Gaiman or Connie Willis
If you are into really far looking SF, fiction by Greg Egan
If you like unorthodox fantasy, fiction by China Mieville
They're the state; they can simply claim ownership of Microsoft assets, like bank accounts et cetera, until the fine is paid, presumably with extra fines on top.
It's about double the population density of the Netherlands. Make it an area the size of two Texases in fertile lowlands, and we can all live there reasonably well.
If you Google for "best countries to live in" and click a few links, it seems that Sweden comes #5 once, #6 once, and #2 on a few other lists (that may have the same source).
Oh, I know. Hand luggage will be one book and one set of spare underwear, and one set of contact lenses (liquid). I know they can do and ask anything they want of me, I'll just go with the flow.
Anyway, I wasn't happy to learn I'd make a stop in the US (flying with a Dutch airline). Wonder if they'll ask questions about that Russian visum in the passport (for a chess tournament)...
Crap, I'm flying to Costa Rica from the EU this Thursday, the plane will make a stop in Miami. I hope the customs checks aren't going to be more insane than they've already been recently.
That said, the US can't really complain too loudly if EU carriers stop giving them all the info they want now - it's clearly against EU privacy laws, and apparently at least one EU carrier (Air Italy) has never given all the info and wasn't prevented from landing, so it would be hypocritical to refuse landing rights immediately.
That's the thing with patents, it doesn't matter if it's a clean-room design. Even if it's your own idea and you had never heard of anybody else doing it, if it infringes on a patent, you owe royalties.
Yes. The Doha round of WTO negotiations have collapsed, so every country is making bilateral agreements with every other country.
And the US is trying to get their IP laws implemented everywhere else, along with mutual recognition of existing patents (that usually don't exist elsewhere yet, so whenever that happens, US companies have lots of patents while companies from the other side have none).
And governments everywhere listen to the same big multinationals, who have US patent portfolios and want to grab the open space everywhere else. See Microsoft etc fighting for software patents in the EU, that sort of thing.
So yes we care, because what happens in the US happens everywhere else, a bit later.
Well, the motion isn't for the entire case, just one small specific sub-part of it - that SCO owes Novell those royalties. It seems to me (and I'm clueless about law except for following these things on Groklaw) that that point may be uncontroversial enough to grant the point.
Of course, SCO will get to file a defence first, but it seems it's pretty hard to give arguments at all - they did receive the royalties, the contract does say that a large part of those go to Novell, and they haven't paid yet. Those are facts. Perhaps they'll be able to make the issue seem slightly controversial, but that won't be easy.
Can I propose a "Parable of the magically fixed window"?
Let's say I have a broken window. Perhaps I don't care about it, perhaps I absolutely need it fixed, perhaps I'' only have it fixed if it's cheaper than $x. It doesn't matter.
If I can magically download a new window from the Internet for free, and if I would have bought one otherwise, I am now free to spend my money on something else. The money goes elsewhere, the economy as a whole should be fine.
If I wouldn't have had it fixed, then there's no money unexpectedly left free, and the economy is unaffected. But I do have a magic window, that's a plus.
Now this obviously sucks for whoever made the magic window and was legally entitled to get paid for any downloads, can't argue that. But the economy as a whole? I don't think so.
(perverted from the well-known-on-Slashdot-since-a-few-weeks Parable of the broken window, may contain obvious stupid mistakes)
When something "becomes" science, that's because it never was philosophy. Philosophy is that discipline that provides you the tools with which you build science. Not the other way around.
Well, that's pretty much true for string theory right now. It's a huge body of math that doesn't predict anything in particular. However, it's possible that in the future, it can be built into something that actually says something about the real world - and then it'd be a useful tool for doing science with.
Right now it's cool math that might some day be usable as a tool to build science with, but nobody knows how yet. Sounds to me like philosophy...
Using the nonsensical word "Islamo-fascist" should disqualify you from any discussion. There's no relation between fascists and terrorists, that's just a made up word to create more irrational fear.
It's a clump of radioactive material, no chain reaction is taking place, so absolutely not comparable to a nuclear explosion. It's just that a RTF uses 3-4 kg of Plutonium, which is a highly radioactive and poisonous material. In case of an accident, if it were to spread around an area, that area would be contaminated.
However, they've always used extremely rugged containers, that can survive rocket explosions leaving the block of plutonium intact.
To know what Perl 6 will be like, read the Synopses.
My own reaction was more like, wow this guy really is nuts, but I really want to see what he'll manage to come up with.:-) (and I say that as a professional Perl programmer...)
No no no - while Moore's law is merely exponential, Gillette's razor blades are on a hyperbolic curve. They'll go to infinity by 2015. The Economist said so!.
Why oh why won't Intel spend their research dollars on something useful, like a bus architecture that can actually keep up with present performance levels?
Yes, because if Intel is working on one thing, that means they can't work on anything else at all anymore...
I think they've certainly been hunting for evidence for that sort of thing, see e.g. this Groklaw article from February. However, I don't follow everything closely enough, I don't know if anything came of that later.
Slashdot Mirror
The main reason is that +- 10 years ago, O'Reilly's books were great and Wrox and Sams were unknown (did they exist?). Nowadays, O'Reilly's lineup has been diluted by a long list of mediocre titles, and there are a lot of other good publishers of tech books.
Programming:
Other:
Chess, why not:
They're the state; they can simply claim ownership of Microsoft assets, like bank accounts et cetera, until the fine is paid, presumably with extra fines on top.
I love it!
Buy a copy of The Pragmatic Programmer for everyone in your team, and make people read it. It's a treasure.
Then you'll at least know what the goal is; how you can get people to change their ways and habits is a problem I haven't found an easy answer to yet.
Argh, ignore the above post, I thought I had hit escape in time. I got it wrong by a factor of 100, it's 200 times as much instead of 2.
It's about double the population density of the Netherlands. Make it an area the size of two Texases in fertile lowlands, and we can all live there reasonably well.
If you Google for "best countries to live in" and click a few links, it seems that Sweden comes #5 once, #6 once, and #2 on a few other lists (that may have the same source).
Oh, I know. Hand luggage will be one book and one set of spare underwear, and one set of contact lenses (liquid). I know they can do and ask anything they want of me, I'll just go with the flow.
Anyway, I wasn't happy to learn I'd make a stop in the US (flying with a Dutch airline). Wonder if they'll ask questions about that Russian visum in the passport (for a chess tournament)...
After Miami, yay, vacation :-)
Crap, I'm flying to Costa Rica from the EU this Thursday, the plane will make a stop in Miami. I hope the customs checks aren't going to be more insane than they've already been recently.
That said, the US can't really complain too loudly if EU carriers stop giving them all the info they want now - it's clearly against EU privacy laws, and apparently at least one EU carrier (Air Italy) has never given all the info and wasn't prevented from landing, so it would be hypocritical to refuse landing rights immediately.
That's the thing with patents, it doesn't matter if it's a clean-room design. Even if it's your own idea and you had never heard of anybody else doing it, if it infringes on a patent, you owe royalties.
Yes. The Doha round of WTO negotiations have collapsed, so every country is making bilateral agreements with every other country.
And the US is trying to get their IP laws implemented everywhere else, along with mutual recognition of existing patents (that usually don't exist elsewhere yet, so whenever that happens, US companies have lots of patents while companies from the other side have none).
And governments everywhere listen to the same big multinationals, who have US patent portfolios and want to grab the open space everywhere else. See Microsoft etc fighting for software patents in the EU, that sort of thing.
So yes we care, because what happens in the US happens everywhere else, a bit later.
Well, the motion isn't for the entire case, just one small specific sub-part of it - that SCO owes Novell those royalties. It seems to me (and I'm clueless about law except for following these things on Groklaw) that that point may be uncontroversial enough to grant the point.
Of course, SCO will get to file a defence first, but it seems it's pretty hard to give arguments at all - they did receive the royalties, the contract does say that a large part of those go to Novell, and they haven't paid yet. Those are facts. Perhaps they'll be able to make the issue seem slightly controversial, but that won't be easy.
Does anybody know what happens with the SCO vs IBM case, if this motion is granted and SCO is bankrupted before the IBM case goes to trial?
I'd love to see a big SCO-shaped crater, but we've been following that case for so long, I want to see how it ends.
I parse that as "we're making shit up, then condense that into something real, at room temperature." :-)
Seriously, I had no idea Slashdot articles could be this far above my head.
Can I propose a "Parable of the magically fixed window"?
Let's say I have a broken window. Perhaps I don't care about it, perhaps I absolutely need it fixed, perhaps I'' only have it fixed if it's cheaper than $x. It doesn't matter.
If I can magically download a new window from the Internet for free, and if I would have bought one otherwise, I am now free to spend my money on something else. The money goes elsewhere, the economy as a whole should be fine.
If I wouldn't have had it fixed, then there's no money unexpectedly left free, and the economy is unaffected. But I do have a magic window, that's a plus.
Now this obviously sucks for whoever made the magic window and was legally entitled to get paid for any downloads, can't argue that. But the economy as a whole? I don't think so.
(perverted from the well-known-on-Slashdot-since-a-few-weeks Parable of the broken window, may contain obvious stupid mistakes)
When something "becomes" science, that's because it never was philosophy. Philosophy is that discipline that provides you the tools with which you build science. Not the other way around.
Well, that's pretty much true for string theory right now. It's a huge body of math that doesn't predict anything in particular. However, it's possible that in the future, it can be built into something that actually says something about the real world - and then it'd be a useful tool for doing science with.
Right now it's cool math that might some day be usable as a tool to build science with, but nobody knows how yet. Sounds to me like philosophy...
Using the nonsensical word "Islamo-fascist" should disqualify you from any discussion. There's no relation between fascists and terrorists, that's just a made up word to create more irrational fear.
It's a clump of radioactive material, no chain reaction is taking place, so absolutely not comparable to a nuclear explosion. It's just that a RTF uses 3-4 kg of Plutonium, which is a highly radioactive and poisonous material. In case of an accident, if it were to spread around an area, that area would be contaminated.
However, they've always used extremely rugged containers, that can survive rocket explosions leaving the block of plutonium intact.
To know what Perl 6 will be like, read the Synopses.
My own reaction was more like, wow this guy really is nuts, but I really want to see what he'll manage to come up with. :-) (and I say that as a professional Perl programmer...)
Did you ever see a friggin' shark in a Google Earth picture? No?
Now you know why.
No no no - while Moore's law is merely exponential, Gillette's razor blades are on a hyperbolic curve. They'll go to infinity by 2015. The Economist said so!.
Moore's law states that transistor density doubles every 24 months, it says nothing about speed or number of cores.
Why oh why won't Intel spend their research dollars on something useful, like a bus architecture that can actually keep up with present performance levels?
Yes, because if Intel is working on one thing, that means they can't work on anything else at all anymore...
I think they've certainly been hunting for evidence for that sort of thing, see e.g. this Groklaw article from February. However, I don't follow everything closely enough, I don't know if anything came of that later.