Here are a few of my favorites; I also suggest checking up reviews on e.g. Amazon to see what's really right for you. The "Customers Who Bought this Item Also Bought" section on Amazon for any of these might provide some great inspiration as well.
Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics, by John Derbyshire
Very engaging account of the history of the Riemann Hypothesis, which is central to prime numbers especially but if proven is known to imply a great number of other results. Got into enough actual mathematics to be a great read for me.
The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry, by Mario Livio
Recounts a lot of the history of the development of group theory and its application to proving that general quintic equations do not have algebraic solutions. Much lighter on the math and heavier on the human interest which was okay with me as there are some pretty colorful characters involved.
Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem, by Simon Singh
Covers the history surrounding Fermat's Last Theorem. I read it quite a while ago so I'm hazy on the details but it was written after the theorem was proven and I think devotes two chapters to the story of the proof. This is the story of the proof, not an explanation as such a thing would be way beyond the realm of popular literature.
If the company is a start-up, then they need to get some process fast or they are one disk crash away from oblivion. If they've been around long enough to know better then you might want to move on now. Either way you can try to encourage them to adopt some process first, then if it just isn't going to happen look for a new job.
They absolutely must have a source control system and offsite backups. It doesn't matter what's normal, not having source control is like not having toilet paper in the bathroom. Even a one-person development team should use it. Offsite backups are literally your fire insurance.
The other things you mentioned are all good to have, and their presence or absence may give you some idea of the relative maturity of the business, but version control and backups are absolutely non-negotiable.
Java versions are a little different. There, you may be forced to develop in an older version to support a customer that's slow to change their client configurations. This can be true especially when your clients are businesses rather than individuals. At one job I was developing in Java 1.1 for a long time because our biggest customer was running Netscape 4 on OS/2 at 6000 locations and that was the latest version they could handle. The software still worked fine for folks with newer browsers and JREs, I just didn't get to use Swing and a host of other niceties.
This is then foiled when pirates spend $10-20 on a pair of tinted glasses that filter out red light.
Except that it's a green laser. If they can find a pair of sunglasses that filters out the right frequency of green light without filtering out the rest of the light they'll still need to see and operate, then that could be a countermeasure.
At the least it would force them to change their mode of operations somewhat.
For what it's worth, the review appears to be a verbatim copy of the first review on amazon.com, by one "Gary Sorkin, Pacific Book Review".
Pacific Book Review, in its profile on amazon.com, describes itself as follows: "We review books for well known authors and emerging authors, and enabling many first time authors to reach the publishers with a recognizable review. We help you get the exposure you need to market your book effectively. We review both published and unpublished books. The only wish we have is for your success as an author."
Very nice. I believe the majority would need *at least* twice as many as the minority, not *more than* twice the minority, but since 206 is not divisible by 3 this doesn't come into play in this case.
you'll find that some though not all Chinese words are meaning-sound combinations: for instance, many words that are pronounced "zhong" have one radical that is also pronounced "zhong" by itself though perhaps in a different tone.
My wife and I have had success with making our own flashcards, each with a different character or compound word.
Sure, defection has a higher expected value, *IF* you assume the other guy is flipping a coin to make his choice. But if you assume the other guy is very similar to yourself, you should expect the other person to reach the same conclusion you do as to what action to take, whatever that may be. Thus instead of looking at the payoffs for each column, look at the two places where each player makes the same choice. In those two places the cooperative choice results in a higher payoff for both players.
The blocks are an interesting controller/display, but the real make-or-break element is the application. I agree with some of the posters here that you could do many of the same things in the demo using a simple mouse-driven interface. Are the blocks supplying all the computing hardware, or do they function in concert with a central computer?
The strength of these as a controller/display is what they bring to the table that more common hardware such as a mouse/keyboard/monitor combination do not. Their ability to sense proximity is not unique unless the software can do something cool when you move one or more of them far from their starting point or combine blocks from different peoples' sets.
Without built-in GPS or at least wi-fi capability their geographic location isn't going to drive the application, unless there are "base stations" at special geographic locations that can essentially tell a particular block that it has been to a particular place.
Since they can communicate over short distances there are some possibilities when you put different peoples' blocks next to each other, maybe along the lines of a trading card game--sort of a fancier version of Bakugan.
Another possible differentiator is the ability of a group of people to use them simultaneously, either cooperatively or competitively. They seemed to suffer from significant lag though, so I'm not convinced time-sensitive applications such as using them to play music would work that well.
The banking industry is very sensitive about the software it allows on its computers due to security considerations. At least one large bank completely configures its PCs from a master CD-ROM, and then locks them down so tight they can't blink. Want to load an Active-X control or install a new executable? Fugeddaboutit! In such an environment, a "zero-footprint" application can be very attractive. If your software is packaged as a web portal with advanced user interaction done in an untrusted Java applet, then provided they have a usable JRE in their master image you can sell your software as not requiring any IT action at the client side. In 2003, when I started my current job,.NET was just getting started and AJAX wasn't really big either; I paid the mortgage for 4 years writing a Java applet that's in use by plenty of major and minor banks around the globe.
BTW, I wrote the applet in Java 1.1.7 so that it could run both on OS-2/Netscape and Windows/IE; one of our largest customers was still using OS/2 throughout its organization until 2004 or so.
I enjoy coding in both Java and C#/.NET; at home I use Java since it's free and there are great free development tools to use with it; at work I program in both environments.
My favorite recent science read was _The Equation that Couldn't Be Solved_, by Mario Livio (Amazon listing). It's a great book about symmetry, group theory, and the lives of several of the mathematicians that discovered and advanced the field, such as Galois and Abel. It has some slightly fluffy chapters but there's a nice mix of mathematics and human interest. Not sure if it would play on Oprah, but Galois's story alone is pretty intense stuff.
Did anyone else notice that the "targets" walked around with their arms clamped to their sides? I suspect the prototype has some *serious* recognition issues.
Ah, but I didn't have a PET; I had a TRS-80. If you wanted lower case on a TRS-80 you had to solder a new PROM piggy-back on the existing character PROM, and install a toggle switch to select between lower case and graphics as lower case took the place of the graphics characters. Not quite as simple as sending a control code!:)
A disgruntled cereal packaging company employee quits, and a few weeks later at 5:00pm some fine Sunday all the boxes on the supermarket shelf simultaneously and inexplicably start flashing goatse...
Whenever someone complains about something like Rob's story above, there are two responses, agreement, and the flat statement that its his Personal Blog and he can do whatever he wants. That misses the point entirely. Anyone can start up a newspaper, and control its content completely, but that newspaper is not going to be taken seriously if they don't maintain journalistic standards.
And what is wrong with the editor writing an editorial? That is a common practice among virtually every newspaper, and is not taken as a blemish on the newspaper's credibility. The content is clearly one person's opinion; CmdrTaco did not presume to speak for the/. community in the article he posted.
The original article only seemed to have a still photo of the car. For a preview of said chase, go to Reuters News and click on the link in the upper right for Reuters Television. One of their featured video clips (as of this writing) is of the car driving on the road, and into, around on, and out of a body of water (presumably the Thames).
Slashdot Mirror
Prime Obsession: Bernhard Riemann and the Greatest Unsolved Problem in Mathematics, by John Derbyshire
Very engaging account of the history of the Riemann Hypothesis, which is central to prime numbers especially but if proven is known to imply a great number of other results. Got into enough actual mathematics to be a great read for me.
The Equation That Couldn't Be Solved: How Mathematical Genius Discovered the Language of Symmetry, by Mario Livio
Recounts a lot of the history of the development of group theory and its application to proving that general quintic equations do not have algebraic solutions. Much lighter on the math and heavier on the human interest which was okay with me as there are some pretty colorful characters involved.
Fermat's Enigma: The Epic Quest to Solve the World's Greatest Mathematical Problem, by Simon Singh
Covers the history surrounding Fermat's Last Theorem. I read it quite a while ago so I'm hazy on the details but it was written after the theorem was proven and I think devotes two chapters to the story of the proof. This is the story of the proof, not an explanation as such a thing would be way beyond the realm of popular literature.
Snakes on a Plane
If the company is a start-up, then they need to get some process fast or they are one disk crash away from oblivion. If they've been around long enough to know better then you might want to move on now. Either way you can try to encourage them to adopt some process first, then if it just isn't going to happen look for a new job. They absolutely must have a source control system and offsite backups. It doesn't matter what's normal, not having source control is like not having toilet paper in the bathroom. Even a one-person development team should use it. Offsite backups are literally your fire insurance. The other things you mentioned are all good to have, and their presence or absence may give you some idea of the relative maturity of the business, but version control and backups are absolutely non-negotiable. Java versions are a little different. There, you may be forced to develop in an older version to support a customer that's slow to change their client configurations. This can be true especially when your clients are businesses rather than individuals. At one job I was developing in Java 1.1 for a long time because our biggest customer was running Netscape 4 on OS/2 at 6000 locations and that was the latest version they could handle. The software still worked fine for folks with newer browsers and JREs, I just didn't get to use Swing and a host of other niceties.
This is then foiled when pirates spend $10-20 on a pair of tinted glasses that filter out red light.
Except that it's a green laser. If they can find a pair of sunglasses that filters out the right frequency of green light without filtering out the rest of the light they'll still need to see and operate, then that could be a countermeasure. At the least it would force them to change their mode of operations somewhat.
For what it's worth, the review appears to be a verbatim copy of the first review on amazon.com, by one "Gary Sorkin, Pacific Book Review".
Pacific Book Review, in its profile on amazon.com, describes itself as follows: "We review books for well known authors and emerging authors, and enabling many first time authors to reach the publishers with a recognizable review. We help you get the exposure you need to market your book effectively. We review both published and unpublished books. The only wish we have is for your success as an author."
It appears that they are a buzz generator.
Very nice. I believe the majority would need *at least* twice as many as the minority, not *more than* twice the minority, but since 206 is not divisible by 3 this doesn't come into play in this case.
My wife and I have had success with making our own flashcards, each with a different character or compound word.
Sure, defection has a higher expected value, *IF* you assume the other guy is flipping a coin to make his choice. But if you assume the other guy is very similar to yourself, you should expect the other person to reach the same conclusion you do as to what action to take, whatever that may be. Thus instead of looking at the payoffs for each column, look at the two places where each player makes the same choice. In those two places the cooperative choice results in a higher payoff for both players.
The strength of these as a controller/display is what they bring to the table that more common hardware such as a mouse/keyboard/monitor combination do not. Their ability to sense proximity is not unique unless the software can do something cool when you move one or more of them far from their starting point or combine blocks from different peoples' sets.
Without built-in GPS or at least wi-fi capability their geographic location isn't going to drive the application, unless there are "base stations" at special geographic locations that can essentially tell a particular block that it has been to a particular place.
Since they can communicate over short distances there are some possibilities when you put different peoples' blocks next to each other, maybe along the lines of a trading card game--sort of a fancier version of Bakugan.
Another possible differentiator is the ability of a group of people to use them simultaneously, either cooperatively or competitively. They seemed to suffer from significant lag though, so I'm not convinced time-sensitive applications such as using them to play music would work that well.
The banking industry is very sensitive about the software it allows on its computers due to security considerations. At least one large bank completely configures its PCs from a master CD-ROM, and then locks them down so tight they can't blink. Want to load an Active-X control or install a new executable? Fugeddaboutit! In such an environment, a "zero-footprint" application can be very attractive. If your software is packaged as a web portal with advanced user interaction done in an untrusted Java applet, then provided they have a usable JRE in their master image you can sell your software as not requiring any IT action at the client side. In 2003, when I started my current job, .NET was just getting started and AJAX wasn't really big either; I paid the mortgage for 4 years writing a Java applet that's in use by plenty of major and minor banks around the globe.
BTW, I wrote the applet in Java 1.1.7 so that it could run both on OS-2/Netscape and Windows/IE; one of our largest customers was still using OS/2 throughout its organization until 2004 or so.
I enjoy coding in both Java and C#/.NET; at home I use Java since it's free and there are great free development tools to use with it; at work I program in both environments.
My favorite recent science read was _The Equation that Couldn't Be Solved_, by Mario Livio (Amazon listing). It's a great book about symmetry, group theory, and the lives of several of the mathematicians that discovered and advanced the field, such as Galois and Abel. It has some slightly fluffy chapters but there's a nice mix of mathematics and human interest. Not sure if it would play on Oprah, but Galois's story alone is pretty intense stuff.
Did anyone else notice that the "targets" walked around with their arms clamped to their sides? I suspect the prototype has some *serious* recognition issues.
Ah, but I didn't have a PET; I had a TRS-80. If you wanted lower case on a TRS-80 you had to solder a new PROM piggy-back on the existing character PROM, and install a toggle switch to select between lower case and graphics as lower case took the place of the graphics characters. Not quite as simple as sending a control code! :)
What? You had lowercase letters? Luxury!
A disgruntled cereal packaging company employee quits, and a few weeks later at 5:00pm some fine Sunday all the boxes on the supermarket shelf simultaneously and inexplicably start flashing goatse...
And what is wrong with the editor writing an editorial? That is a common practice among virtually every newspaper, and is not taken as a blemish on the newspaper's credibility. The content is clearly one person's opinion; CmdrTaco did not presume to speak for the
"Alice", CalTech's entry this year, has a yellow LED on the front that cycles back and forth. I'm pretty sure it's just there for looks.
I dunno, something the size of "a large fridge" seems pretty bulky to strap to a fighter. Seems more suitable for a bomber somehow.
You forgot H2K2 (2002).
The original article only seemed to have a still photo of the car. For a preview of said chase, go to Reuters News and click on the link in the upper right for Reuters Television. One of their featured video clips (as of this writing) is of the car driving on the road, and into, around on, and out of a body of water (presumably the Thames).