A degree simply provides evidence that you have a clue about what you're doing, nothing more. Same for certifications. But neither are substitutes for actually kicking ass and getting caught taking names.
If you can demonstrate you're awesome at what you do, you'll get hired. If not, no degree or certification in the world will help you.
This won't go anywhere if IBM doesn't clean up its blade management console.
I've been doing extensive research on blade servers recently for my company, and when it comes down to it, IBM's centralized management for blade servers is hands down the worst in the industry. RLX used to be the best, but they're out of the business now. HP was #2, now they're the leader. Egenera is doing some really cool things, but their setup is just way too expensive (almost 5 times the price of the other leading blade systems).
So, even if these cell blades were to be the coolest thing ever, if IBM doesn't make an investment into improving their management software, no one's going to buy these things unless they already have a large investment in IBM hardware or are just downright masochistic.
Basically, what it comes down to is, someone needs to buy the RLX software, it's on the market now. If I were IBM, I'd buy this and retool it for IBM blades. What I'm scared of is Dell buying the RLX software. Dell blades suck, but with the RLX console, even I would consider buying Dell blades, that RLX management software is just that good.
In short, if I were IBM, I'd buy RLX in a second, and catapult myself to being the industry leader in blade servers.
Okay, this is going to be rather long, so please bear with me.
First off, let me say that I am involved in the automated essay grading industry, and have helped to develop RocketScore which does everything Criterion does, and lots more. Forgive me for blatant plugs in this post, I'll try and keep them to a minimum.
But let's move on to the focus of this article.
First off, there is a lot of criticism about essay graders being formulaic, only capable of seeing patterns that arose in their originating sample set of essays. With Criterion, an offshoot of ETS's e-rater, this is a serious concern. When you only look at what you see, anything out of left field looks completely awry, and cannot be graded appropriately. RocketScore is different; RocketScore uses a "features" method to check for included or excluded material, among many other things, and is therefore quite good at noticing subtle writing and essays types which it has never seen before.
One of the great things about essay graders is that they give a student an objective standard to look to. Human graders grade differently based upon mood, time they have to review the writing, and many other mittigating factors. In other words, the same human grader might grade the same essay differently at separate points in time. Most essay graders will always grade the same essay in the same manner. This is great for a student, for if a teacher gives you a D when the essay grader says it's in B range, one might be able to use this evidence to force the teacher to reconsider the grade. Or vica versa. If the essay grader is telling you that you're getting a D, you can work and improve on it until you're getting that B you'd be happy with.
But there are serious drawbacks to the comments E-Rater and Criterion give. E-Rater gives comments soley based on your score (if you get a 1, you get comment set 1, if you get a 2, comment set 2, etc.). Criterion gives a student "instructional feedback in basic grammar, usage, style and organization." E-Rater's comments are inadequate at best, and Criterion's leave a lot to be desired. RocketScore provides substantial feedback on how to improve your writing. Not just stylistic and grammatical comments, but comments on what you should be writing more about (you didn't provide enough info!), what you should be writing less about (you gave too much info!), and how to balance your arguments, among many other categories.
There are two major problems with essay grading. The first is bullshit detection, and the second is determining if the essay actually answered the question asked. E-rater and Criterion both have real problems with these two criteria. With bullshit detection, RocketScore has threshholds which can be set and manipulated on the fly, from throwing out anything which isn't completely relevant to the topic, to allowing just about any essay submitted. And you will get a score and comments based upon what you submitted. Of course, these are most helpful when you make a meaningful attempt to submit a relevant essay.
"The machine score and the human score are in agreement 97 percent to 98 percent of the time."
Yes, but do you know how ETS defines "agreement"? Glad you asked. When the grader's grade is within a point of the human's grade. Now, with the SAT 2 test, which is on a scale of 1 through 6, that means if the grader says 2, and a human says 1, 2, or 3, then there's agreement. But that's 50% of the scale! Their essay grader has a 98% chance of hitting the wall in front of them as opposed to the wall next to them. Woohoo. Meanwhile, RocketScore provides decimal point accuracy (we don't give you a 4 or a 5, we give you a 4.1, or 5.3), and is 98% accurate. But how do we define accurate? When the grader's grade is rounded to the nearest whole number, and that number is the human's grade. In other words, if we give you a 4.3, there is a 98% chance a human would give you a 4. With 4.5,
Yeah, you've certainly got some points there. I've had the same CD problems (where a module wouldn't release control, and couldn't be rmmod'd) one or two times before, and it's certainly remarkably annoying.
There are great tools out there, like fuser and lsof to help when you're having problems with a device, and there's great community support.
And I didn't mean to make it seem like man pages are the solution to all of Linux's problems. They're nowhere close. What I did mean to say is that there are many tools, and a lot of "annoyances" people have which could be easily fixed by asking a simple question on, say, #Debian on irc.debian.org. Or #linux.
In other words, there's a remarkably great and helpful community out there which people don't know how to properly consult. I've never had an "annoyance" last more than a short while between the appropriate HOWTOs and asking the right questions online.
So in short, people need to be informed on how to use the tools at their disposal (man pages, USENET, IRC, and hell, slashdot) for their benefit. That is what is lacking, and that is what generates a lot of "annoyances." That said, of course there are genuine annoyances too, like your aformentioned CD module problem, and things which are still just very tedious to take care of.
"lsof/mountpoint/" will show you exactly what file descriptors are open, and allow you to easily terminate them by PID. lsof has a plethora of options, check out the man page, I'm sure you'll find it remarkably helpful.
Quoth Hemos: Or maybe it has to do with being an incredible distance, on an inhumane climate. Either or.
I have to really disagree with this. NASA is used to dealing with alien climates and terrain and astronomical distances. NASA is also used to dealing with problems. They have some of the best problem solvers out there, and when something goes wrong, then tend to pinpoint why. When NASA says A, B, and C are the causes of failure, I believe them. When NASA cannot figure out why something went wrong, I worry.
What I'm trying to say is, distance and inhuman conditions shouldn't have that much of an affect on how well a probe works. We built Voyagers I and II, didn't we? They worked even better than expected. And they encountered climates and conditions which make Mars look easy.
NASA has dealt with so many varying circumstances and climates over the years, and been so blunt about their mistakes, I find it hard to believe that they would blame the failures of an entire class of missions on something "easy." And yes, blaiming failures on software is an easy way out, how many times have you heard someone say "Oh! It must be the software!" when something doesn't go as expected?
Now, I know this guy doesn't speak for NASA as a whole, but as a NASA trained administrator, and the head of some very large projects, I'm willing to take his opinions at face value. If he says it looks like software has really been a cause of failure, who am I to laugh at his expertise and belittle his explanations? I might not like his explanation, but I buy it.
Reading the comment, I really felt that the person was trolling. In other words, the person knew what he was saying was incorrect, and was backing his argument up by saying "well, didn't the movie say he got a nobel prize for some economic idea... and therefore he invented game theory?"
But I _hate_ modding people down, and felt it would be much more helpful if I replied and stated why he was wrong, just in case he was actually sincere, or people read what he was saying and took it as fact.
And regarding your last statement, my only defense if I came off with a holier-than-thou attitude was that I was dead tired at the time of posting. Well, not so much a defense as an explanation.
I just had the option of modding you down as a troll or replying to your comment. Thankfully for you, I decided to reply.
John Nash is _not_ the originator of Game Theory. John von Neumann is. Do a google search on him.
Nash had many interesting ideas relating to all sorts of fields including economics and game theory, but he did not originate either one. Von Neumann, on the other hand, created an entirely new field of mathematics which is interrelated with economics, political science, sociology and others. If you ever get a chance to read von Neumann's books, I highly recommend it.
Okay, this flame started on the New York Fair Use mailing list about a week ago.
It started when Rubin Safir (the founder of NYLXS) heard about the eGov conference and the fact that MS would be speaking. As the flame continued, Bruce Perens, Richard Stallman, and myself all chimed in.
The majority of the people on the list want to forbid MS from speaking _at_all_costs_.
Basically, they don't like the idea of letting Microsoft talk, and then rebutting MS's arguments via a following speaker and a Q&A session. They say it just gives MS more floor time, which is bad. They have a point, but people will hear MS's FUD, and I would rather people heard it and then heard it debunked. In other words, if MS is going to say anything at all about open source, I want it on _our_ terms and in _our_ forums, not theirs.
I said they were taking up the fight from the consumer's point of view. I did not say that was their reason for fighting.
That said, you are certainly correct in your assertion that they stand to make more money if there's a stronger ruling against Microsoft. I just don't think the companies are completely apathetical towards the consumers, but certainly more so than the article and lawsuit might make it seem.
The CCIA counts Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo and Nokia among its members.
The organisation said it had filed the new complaint in order to fight for customers.
"Microsoft's overwhelming dominance and its abuse of that dominance reaches into every corner of Europe and harms virtually every business and consumer who uses a computer," the association said.
This organization consists of companies who _know_ what they're talking about when it comes to computers and competition (and anti-competitive tactics, for that matter), and are taking up the fight from the _consumers'_ point of view. I think it is this twist which might lead to actual rulings which will stop Microsoft's hard-edged and illegal tactics.
Remember, Microsoft has had _two_ separate antitrust ruling against it (i.e. has been found guilty not once, but twice), but neither has had the bite to make any noticable differences in the way Microsoft has acted. Both suits really focused upon MS's anti-competitive methods, and not enough focus on what MS was doing to the consumers. This angle might just be what is needed.
Of course, since this is an EU case, who knows how a ruling with teeth might affect Microsoft - it would certainly affect them overseas, but here in America a difference might not be noticable.
No reading of minds yet
on
Going Cyberpunk
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Quoth the article:
"For example, you could put slices from brain nerve cells on the chip, apply drugs and see how the nerve signals" and cells react to a particular drug, he said in an interview.
So reading one's mind is still _far_ in the future. That said, it's still a very cool technology which will allow for more information on how the brain works, and hopefully some serious medical advances.
It's Euler's equation, and it is e^(pi*i) + 1 = 0.
It's special because it is an equation involving all five fundamental constants of calculus. Saying e^(pi*i) = -1 removes the uniqueness of the equation. Just a note.
But in general relativity, everything has a speed -- and that speed is no greater than the speed of light.
This is incorrect. General relativity says nothing about speeds greater than that of light. What GR says is that nothing can accelerate to the speed of light. So, any object at a speed less than that of light (say, an object at rest), cannot be accelerated to or past the speed of light.
But GR says nothing about objects already moving faster than the speed of light. None are known to exist (and we'd have a damn hard time measuring their speed if they did exist), but they are not excluded by the theory.
<crazy but possible>
If objects exist which are already moving faster than the speed of light, it should be possible to cause other objects moving slower than the speed of light to attain faster than light speeds. If you bombard the slower than light object with the faster than light object, the slower object will gain momentum from the faster, and the faster will lose some momentum.
Think of two billiards balls, one at rest, and the other hit towards the resting ball. When they hit, the stationary balls starts moving and the ball you just hit moves off more slowly, having instantaneously transfered some of its energy to the previously stationary ball. The speeds and angles which occur are easily determined by the equations for inelastic collisions. There is no acceleration, but instantaneously transfered energy and a new speed and direction for both the colliding masses.
So, in theory, if you hit a slower than light object moving sufficiently faster than the speed of light, you could cause it in turn to move faster than the speed of light.
Of course, this theory only works if faster than light objects already exist and the equations for inelastic collisions are both correct and work at such high speeds.
Well, what kind of range in books are you looking for?
Are you just looking for thicker technical manuals, or are you considering expanding some HOWTOs into books form, writing and expanding better and more detailed man and info pages, teaching certain tools from scratch, putting together cohesive references for the open source developer, or other documents like that?
Some of these really need to be written. But as part of your series? What areas do you want to see covered, what areas do you think have been covered enough, and what areas do you think should be left to O'Reilley?
Or to go backwards, there's one area I feel O'Reilley is extremely poor in: development with multiple tools. I'm not talking lex and yacc, but rather (off the top of my head) perl and C, or pyhton and shell scripts. They have "perl for sysadmins" and pocket references, but no good books on how to use separate tools well together. The closest they come to discussing the use of separate tools together (from what I've read, and I may be completely missing a section of their books) are their books on web CGI programming.
If there were a good book out there on, say, how to use perl and python together to write text-intensive apps with killer object models, I'd buy it in a second. My point is, there are a lot of tools out there, and I think there just aren't good books out there on how to use the tools together -- each tools seems to be encased in its own book with very spartan references to how to use it with other tools. This can be fixed, easily. I think books bridging tools together could do very well.
Eh, the headline was 100% accurate. But take the headline with some of the other news we've been recieving through slashdot lately and it comes out completely different. Accurate. But misleading.
Disclaimer: This is not an attempt at humor (seriously).
From the headline, I thought that the FBI was attempting to track criminals through the use of banner ads (i.e. use something embedded in the ads to track those who view them). Although it seems like a very hard thing to pull off - how would you track a criminal with the data you'd collect anyway?
And then I thought about the recent article Because Only Terrorists User 802.11 and got very worried about my ability to block popups via Mozilla or hosts.deny. I was afraid of the headline "Because Only Criminals and Terrorists Block Popup Ads to Avoid Detection".
Oh well, thank god the article clarified that. The article states that the FBI will basically putting up wanted posters as ads to help find the criminal they're after. That, I don't have a problem with.
I have to partially disagree with you. In general, you're right. But people who express an interest in learning Linux should realize that part of Linux *is* the command line. At this point in Linux's development, a user will need to access the command line in one form or another from time to time.
Don't shrink away from it and say users don't want to know about it, or that it scares users away. Conversely, don't make out Linux to be only the command line. Don't spend too much time talking about the command line and shell scripting and how anything the gui does you can do from the command line. Completely ignoring a large part of the system that a user will need to use is dishonest. There is a healthy balance to be found.
Your other points are extremely poignant and I agree with them fully. Newbies should experience the freedom gained by using Linux, the sense of community in the Linux world, and one's ability to contribute to that community.
UNIX for Programmers and Users (Second Edition) is an excellent book. Well, to be fair, it was the first edition which eased me into *nix years ago. With such an excellent first edition, I'm sure the second is even stronger.
Graham Glass is a skilled writer who is capable of introducing complex topics and commands easily to the reader, regardless of their skill level. His book benefited me greatly, and even allowed my father to gain a good footing in unix commands and philosophy.
I have recommended this book to numerous people over the years, to people who just wanted some familiarity with unix commands, to people who were interested in learning Linux, to students looking for interesting things to delve into, and to many others. The book has benefited them all. Although it is not directly a Linux book, it is exceptional at providing the tools necessary to use any unix-like system. This makes this book a wonderful reference or a great starting out point if you're just beginning.
And where is the line between criminal negligence and supporting terrorists? I'm having some serious problems even seeing that line, let alone determining where it might lie.
I agree that HomSec has touched upon an important issue, but labelling insecure wireless networks as being supportive to terrorists is really way out there.
Since I need to go to sleep, I'll just post links to what I'd otherwise repeat:
Slashdot Mirror
Getting hired comes down to two things:
1) Do you rock at what you do?
2) Does everyone know it?
A degree simply provides evidence that you have a clue about what you're doing, nothing more. Same for certifications. But neither are substitutes for actually kicking ass and getting caught taking names.
If you can demonstrate you're awesome at what you do, you'll get hired. If not, no degree or certification in the world will help you.
C-x C-c
or :wq! if you prefer
Dude, have you ever heard of Ecstacy?
This won't go anywhere if IBM doesn't clean up its blade management console.
I've been doing extensive research on blade servers recently for my company, and when it comes down to it, IBM's centralized management for blade servers is hands down the worst in the industry. RLX used to be the best, but they're out of the business now. HP was #2, now they're the leader. Egenera is doing some really cool things, but their setup is just way too expensive (almost 5 times the price of the other leading blade systems).
So, even if these cell blades were to be the coolest thing ever, if IBM doesn't make an investment into improving their management software, no one's going to buy these things unless they already have a large investment in IBM hardware or are just downright masochistic.
Basically, what it comes down to is, someone needs to buy the RLX software, it's on the market now. If I were IBM, I'd buy this and retool it for IBM blades. What I'm scared of is Dell buying the RLX software. Dell blades suck, but with the RLX console, even I would consider buying Dell blades, that RLX management software is just that good.
In short, if I were IBM, I'd buy RLX in a second, and catapult myself to being the industry leader in blade servers.
First off, let me say that I am involved in the automated essay grading industry, and have helped to develop RocketScore which does everything Criterion does, and lots more. Forgive me for blatant plugs in this post, I'll try and keep them to a minimum.
But let's move on to the focus of this article.
First off, there is a lot of criticism about essay graders being formulaic, only capable of seeing patterns that arose in their originating sample set of essays. With Criterion, an offshoot of ETS's e-rater, this is a serious concern. When you only look at what you see, anything out of left field looks completely awry, and cannot be graded appropriately. RocketScore is different; RocketScore uses a "features" method to check for included or excluded material, among many other things, and is therefore quite good at noticing subtle writing and essays types which it has never seen before.
One of the great things about essay graders is that they give a student an objective standard to look to. Human graders grade differently based upon mood, time they have to review the writing, and many other mittigating factors. In other words, the same human grader might grade the same essay differently at separate points in time. Most essay graders will always grade the same essay in the same manner. This is great for a student, for if a teacher gives you a D when the essay grader says it's in B range, one might be able to use this evidence to force the teacher to reconsider the grade. Or vica versa. If the essay grader is telling you that you're getting a D, you can work and improve on it until you're getting that B you'd be happy with.
But there are serious drawbacks to the comments E-Rater and Criterion give. E-Rater gives comments soley based on your score (if you get a 1, you get comment set 1, if you get a 2, comment set 2, etc.). Criterion gives a student "instructional feedback in basic grammar, usage, style and organization." E-Rater's comments are inadequate at best, and Criterion's leave a lot to be desired. RocketScore provides substantial feedback on how to improve your writing. Not just stylistic and grammatical comments, but comments on what you should be writing more about (you didn't provide enough info!), what you should be writing less about (you gave too much info!), and how to balance your arguments, among many other categories.
There are two major problems with essay grading. The first is bullshit detection, and the second is determining if the essay actually answered the question asked. E-rater and Criterion both have real problems with these two criteria. With bullshit detection, RocketScore has threshholds which can be set and manipulated on the fly, from throwing out anything which isn't completely relevant to the topic, to allowing just about any essay submitted. And you will get a score and comments based upon what you submitted. Of course, these are most helpful when you make a meaningful attempt to submit a relevant essay.
Yes, but do you know how ETS defines "agreement"? Glad you asked. When the grader's grade is within a point of the human's grade. Now, with the SAT 2 test, which is on a scale of 1 through 6, that means if the grader says 2, and a human says 1, 2, or 3, then there's agreement. But that's 50% of the scale! Their essay grader has a 98% chance of hitting the wall in front of them as opposed to the wall next to them. Woohoo. Meanwhile, RocketScore provides decimal point accuracy (we don't give you a 4 or a 5, we give you a 4.1, or 5.3), and is 98% accurate. But how do we define accurate? When the grader's grade is rounded to the nearest whole number, and that number is the human's grade. In other words, if we give you a 4.3, there is a 98% chance a human would give you a 4. With 4.5,
There are great tools out there, like fuser and lsof to help when you're having problems with a device, and there's great community support.
And I didn't mean to make it seem like man pages are the solution to all of Linux's problems. They're nowhere close. What I did mean to say is that there are many tools, and a lot of "annoyances" people have which could be easily fixed by asking a simple question on, say, #Debian on irc.debian.org. Or #linux.
In other words, there's a remarkably great and helpful community out there which people don't know how to properly consult. I've never had an "annoyance" last more than a short while between the appropriate HOWTOs and asking the right questions online.
So in short, people need to be informed on how to use the tools at their disposal (man pages, USENET, IRC, and hell, slashdot) for their benefit. That is what is lacking, and that is what generates a lot of "annoyances." That said, of course there are genuine annoyances too, like your aformentioned CD module problem, and things which are still just very tedious to take care of.
</rant>
"lsof /mountpoint/" will show you exactly what file descriptors are open, and allow you to easily terminate them by PID. lsof has a plethora of options, check out the man page, I'm sure you'll find it remarkably helpful.
I have to really disagree with this. NASA is used to dealing with alien climates and terrain and astronomical distances. NASA is also used to dealing with problems. They have some of the best problem solvers out there, and when something goes wrong, then tend to pinpoint why. When NASA says A, B, and C are the causes of failure, I believe them. When NASA cannot figure out why something went wrong, I worry.
What I'm trying to say is, distance and inhuman conditions shouldn't have that much of an affect on how well a probe works. We built Voyagers I and II, didn't we? They worked even better than expected. And they encountered climates and conditions which make Mars look easy.
NASA has dealt with so many varying circumstances and climates over the years, and been so blunt about their mistakes, I find it hard to believe that they would blame the failures of an entire class of missions on something "easy." And yes, blaiming failures on software is an easy way out, how many times have you heard someone say "Oh! It must be the software!" when something doesn't go as expected?
Now, I know this guy doesn't speak for NASA as a whole, but as a NASA trained administrator, and the head of some very large projects, I'm willing to take his opinions at face value. If he says it looks like software has really been a cause of failure, who am I to laugh at his expertise and belittle his explanations? I might not like his explanation, but I buy it.
Reading the comment, I really felt that the person was trolling. In other words, the person knew what he was saying was incorrect, and was backing his argument up by saying "well, didn't the movie say he got a nobel prize for some economic idea... and therefore he invented game theory?"
But I _hate_ modding people down, and felt it would be much more helpful if I replied and stated why he was wrong, just in case he was actually sincere, or people read what he was saying and took it as fact.
And regarding your last statement, my only defense if I came off with a holier-than-thou attitude was that I was dead tired at the time of posting. Well, not so much a defense as an explanation.
John Nash is _not_ the originator of Game Theory. John von Neumann is. Do a google search on him.
Nash had many interesting ideas relating to all sorts of fields including economics and game theory, but he did not originate either one. Von Neumann, on the other hand, created an entirely new field of mathematics which is interrelated with economics, political science, sociology and others. If you ever get a chance to read von Neumann's books, I highly recommend it.
It started when Rubin Safir (the founder of NYLXS) heard about the eGov conference and the fact that MS would be speaking. As the flame continued, Bruce Perens, Richard Stallman, and myself all chimed in.
The majority of the people on the list want to forbid MS from speaking _at_all_costs_.
Basically, they don't like the idea of letting Microsoft talk, and then rebutting MS's arguments via a following speaker and a Q&A session. They say it just gives MS more floor time, which is bad. They have a point, but people will hear MS's FUD, and I would rather people heard it and then heard it debunked. In other words, if MS is going to say anything at all about open source, I want it on _our_ terms and in _our_ forums, not theirs.
That said, you are certainly correct in your assertion that they stand to make more money if there's a stronger ruling against Microsoft. I just don't think the companies are completely apathetical towards the consumers, but certainly more so than the article and lawsuit might make it seem.
This organization consists of companies who _know_ what they're talking about when it comes to computers and competition (and anti-competitive tactics, for that matter), and are taking up the fight from the _consumers'_ point of view. I think it is this twist which might lead to actual rulings which will stop Microsoft's hard-edged and illegal tactics.
Remember, Microsoft has had _two_ separate antitrust ruling against it (i.e. has been found guilty not once, but twice), but neither has had the bite to make any noticable differences in the way Microsoft has acted. Both suits really focused upon MS's anti-competitive methods, and not enough focus on what MS was doing to the consumers. This angle might just be what is needed.
Of course, since this is an EU case, who knows how a ruling with teeth might affect Microsoft - it would certainly affect them overseas, but here in America a difference might not be noticable.
So reading one's mind is still _far_ in the future. That said, it's still a very cool technology which will allow for more information on how the brain works, and hopefully some serious medical advances.
Gibson will be signing books at the Union Square Barnes and Noble in New York City on Thursday (February 13th) at 7pm.
</psa>
It's Euler's equation, and it is e^(pi*i) + 1 = 0.
It's special because it is an equation involving all five fundamental constants of calculus. Saying e^(pi*i) = -1 removes the uniqueness of the equation. Just a note.
This is incorrect. General relativity says nothing about speeds greater than that of light. What GR says is that nothing can accelerate to the speed of light. So, any object at a speed less than that of light (say, an object at rest), cannot be accelerated to or past the speed of light.
But GR says nothing about objects already moving faster than the speed of light. None are known to exist (and we'd have a damn hard time measuring their speed if they did exist), but they are not excluded by the theory.
<crazy but possible>
If objects exist which are already moving faster than the speed of light, it should be possible to cause other objects moving slower than the speed of light to attain faster than light speeds. If you bombard the slower than light object with the faster than light object, the slower object will gain momentum from the faster, and the faster will lose some momentum.
Think of two billiards balls, one at rest, and the other hit towards the resting ball. When they hit, the stationary balls starts moving and the ball you just hit moves off more slowly, having instantaneously transfered some of its energy to the previously stationary ball. The speeds and angles which occur are easily determined by the equations for inelastic collisions. There is no acceleration, but instantaneously transfered energy and a new speed and direction for both the colliding masses.
So, in theory, if you hit a slower than light object moving sufficiently faster than the speed of light, you could cause it in turn to move faster than the speed of light.
Of course, this theory only works if faster than light objects already exist and the equations for inelastic collisions are both correct and work at such high speeds.
</crazy but possible>
Are you just looking for thicker technical manuals, or are you considering expanding some HOWTOs into books form, writing and expanding better and more detailed man and info pages, teaching certain tools from scratch, putting together cohesive references for the open source developer, or other documents like that?
Some of these really need to be written. But as part of your series? What areas do you want to see covered, what areas do you think have been covered enough, and what areas do you think should be left to O'Reilley?
Or to go backwards, there's one area I feel O'Reilley is extremely poor in: development with multiple tools. I'm not talking lex and yacc, but rather (off the top of my head) perl and C, or pyhton and shell scripts. They have "perl for sysadmins" and pocket references, but no good books on how to use separate tools well together. The closest they come to discussing the use of separate tools together (from what I've read, and I may be completely missing a section of their books) are their books on web CGI programming.
If there were a good book out there on, say, how to use perl and python together to write text-intensive apps with killer object models, I'd buy it in a second. My point is, there are a lot of tools out there, and I think there just aren't good books out there on how to use the tools together -- each tools seems to be encased in its own book with very spartan references to how to use it with other tools. This can be fixed, easily. I think books bridging tools together could do very well.
So what do you want to get written?
Well, you see, today is the 50th anniversary of the first April Fools' day.
There's a nice synopsis about Jon's lies and the "truth" behind DeCSS here. Not what you're talking about, but a very nice corollary.
That is all.
From the headline, I thought that the FBI was attempting to track criminals through the use of banner ads (i.e. use something embedded in the ads to track those who view them). Although it seems like a very hard thing to pull off - how would you track a criminal with the data you'd collect anyway?
And then I thought about the recent article Because Only Terrorists User 802.11 and got very worried about my ability to block popups via Mozilla or hosts.deny. I was afraid of the headline "Because Only Criminals and Terrorists Block Popup Ads to Avoid Detection".
Oh well, thank god the article clarified that. The article states that the FBI will basically putting up wanted posters as ads to help find the criminal they're after. That, I don't have a problem with.
Don't shrink away from it and say users don't want to know about it, or that it scares users away. Conversely, don't make out Linux to be only the command line. Don't spend too much time talking about the command line and shell scripting and how anything the gui does you can do from the command line. Completely ignoring a large part of the system that a user will need to use is dishonest. There is a healthy balance to be found.
Your other points are extremely poignant and I agree with them fully. Newbies should experience the freedom gained by using Linux, the sense of community in the Linux world, and one's ability to contribute to that community.
Graham Glass is a skilled writer who is capable of introducing complex topics and commands easily to the reader, regardless of their skill level. His book benefited me greatly, and even allowed my father to gain a good footing in unix commands and philosophy.
I have recommended this book to numerous people over the years, to people who just wanted some familiarity with unix commands, to people who were interested in learning Linux, to students looking for interesting things to delve into, and to many others. The book has benefited them all. Although it is not directly a Linux book, it is exceptional at providing the tools necessary to use any unix-like system. This makes this book a wonderful reference or a great starting out point if you're just beginning.
In other words, I highly recommend it.
I agree that HomSec has touched upon an important issue, but labelling insecure wireless networks as being supportive to terrorists is really way out there.
Since I need to go to sleep, I'll just post links to what I'd otherwise repeat:
I will repeat one thing I previously said though:
Insecure wireless networks shouldn't be a matter of National Security, they should be a matter of personal security.