Bujold is excellent, as is Weber. Others that might be good beginning reads for budding SF readers are: John Ringo's Posleen series (though it is a bit violent and has some strong language), Asimov's Robot novels (The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn, and Robots and Empire) or Empire novels (Pebble in the Sky and The Currents of Space). The Caves of Steel is an excellent introduction to SF for those who already like mysteries. Clarke is good, but stick to the 2001 series or the short stories. Rama is a bit... weird for early teenagers. Heinlein, while excellent, is also better for mid-teens or up. Not because of the sexual content, mind you, but because the political and social commentary is probably a bit over their heads. Another excellent starter is Fallen Angels by Niven, Pournelle and Flynn.
I would like to get some help with proposing the solution that Madgreek has chosen for my (very large) organization. I'd rather not go into too many details about my workplace itself, but it suffices to say that it is a very large, bureaucratic place, and I am but a very small, very junior cog, working in a helpdesk. My organization is stuck in a Windows/M$ Office mold, but I think that going to Linux/Open Office would be very beneficial, especially with the recent budget crunch we've been having. I'm looking (and can't seem to find any information through google) for the savings, both in dollars and cents as well as in saved downtime due to malware in switching. Please don't send replies with the usual flamewar-type answers. I'm wanting to show how FOSS can provide equivalent or better functionality with minimal end-user impact, and just saying how great $flavor_of_Linux is won't help me convince the higher-ups that it'll work at least as well as their Windows boxes.
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Bujold is excellent, as is Weber. Others that might be good beginning reads for budding SF readers are: John Ringo's Posleen series (though it is a bit violent and has some strong language), Asimov's Robot novels (The Caves of Steel, The Naked Sun, The Robots of Dawn, and Robots and Empire) or Empire novels (Pebble in the Sky and The Currents of Space). The Caves of Steel is an excellent introduction to SF for those who already like mysteries. Clarke is good, but stick to the 2001 series or the short stories. Rama is a bit ... weird for early teenagers. Heinlein, while excellent, is also better for mid-teens or up. Not because of the sexual content, mind you, but because the political and social commentary is probably a bit over their heads. Another excellent starter is Fallen Angels by Niven, Pournelle and Flynn.
I would like to get some help with proposing the solution that Madgreek has chosen for my (very large) organization. I'd rather not go into too many details about my workplace itself, but it suffices to say that it is a very large, bureaucratic place, and I am but a very small, very junior cog, working in a helpdesk. My organization is stuck in a Windows/M$ Office mold, but I think that going to Linux/Open Office would be very beneficial, especially with the recent budget crunch we've been having. I'm looking (and can't seem to find any information through google) for the savings, both in dollars and cents as well as in saved downtime due to malware in switching. Please don't send replies with the usual flamewar-type answers. I'm wanting to show how FOSS can provide equivalent or better functionality with minimal end-user impact, and just saying how great $flavor_of_Linux is won't help me convince the higher-ups that it'll work at least as well as their Windows boxes.