I was home sick for two days this week. I spent most of the time watching videos on Hulu and Netflix [via my Xbox360].
I just looked and I've used about 58.5GB in the last week, and that's just incoming data. Granted that was a slightly heavier use week than is normal but over the last month I've averaged about 4.5GB/day. I certainly don't feel that I'm abusing the network. I don't do p2p [very rarely]. I download the occasional Linux ISO, a small amount of backup data from my mail server, some gaming and the Hulu/Netflix watching.
Thankfully I have AT&T DSL [6M/768k @ $35/mo]. They're not nearly as great as Speakeasy [which I sadly can't get here] but at least they're 1000X better than the cable companies.
Thanks for such an insightful comment on the situation of our state government. You are quite correct in you assessment. Texans want to be left alone, and not be harassed by our local, state or even national government.
Except, it seems, when it comes to: - Buying a car - dealership can only be open ONE day on weekends, Sat or Sun but no both. Most choose to be open on Sat.
- Buying alcohol - Too many dry counties to count. And yet there's drive-thru liquor stores in some areas. WTF?
- Sex Toys - Texans will have a fit if you try to legistlate anything about their ability to own and use a gun [even useful stuff like requiring a farking child lock if you have kids in the home]. But they sure fight like hell to make sure Texas residents don't have access to anything that might make you feel good. Most of the places that can sell sex toys can't actually call them sex toys. They must be sold as 'novelties'. Another sign of blatant hypocrisy: There's more strip-clubs here than I've seen anywhere else I've ever been.
Yeah, these Texans hate the government telling them what to do...
/live in Arlington, TX //Trying as hard as I can to get back to San Jose, CA...
Actually I wonder if this is intentional. My thoughts are that either:
1. This is an April fools joke
2. They are serious, *but* decided to make the announcement a couple weeks before April 1st. The will spend the next weeks gaging the response and if they see that a large number of people are unhappy about the new name, they will come out on April 1st and announce it was an April fools joke.
Pretty slick really. I don't care which it is, as long as April 1st brings announcements that it's a joke. I don't even have cable/dish, but I was thinking of getting something so I could have SciFi. After what I've heard about recent programming [Wrestling? Really?], and this name-change, I don't think I'm going to be rushing out to try to get SciFi/SyFy anytime soon.
I think some of you folks need to double-check your providers or your internal networking. I've only a few times had my movie not start with four bars to my XBOX360 or subsequently reduce quality.
Once my backup machine was doing two backups and overloading my poor little wireless router. I set up QOS to give the Netflix connection priority and it never happened again.
The other few times were because I was using a crappy wireless connection and double NAT [ internet -> router -> wireless-> Media PC w/ICS -> xbox360 wired. ] It's amazing it worked at all. I've since wired the Xbox360 directly to the router and have never failed to get 4 bars and a great picture quality from Netflix or Hulu.
By contrast: one of my sites had 15 minutes of fame, and had 20,000 page views across about three hours. It was running as static content, from a Xen instance, with 1GB of memory, and about 25% of processor time on a dual processor 1GHz system. There wasn't even a hiccup in dealing with the load.
Yeah it all really does depend on the type of load. I don't recall the stats of how many visitors/unique I had but on Sept 11, 2001 when all the major news sites were down I hosted a ton of pictures and video [mostly between 100k-5MB file size], and posted the link here on Slashdot.
My poor little AMD K6-350Mhz with 256MB of RAM and was averaging about 75Mbit/sec outbound for most of the rest of the day.
So if you're just hosting up static content you could probably handle 1000+ visitors a day on a modern cell phone.
Faster boot + login times. Everyone fudges on boot times by declaring that the computer is booted up before it is really ready to use. It takes an additional 10 seconds or so for the GUI environment to initialize and automatic login to finish. And that's without restoring any saved apps.
I time my boot times from the moment I hit the power button until I have displayed www.google.com in a web browser.
Using a bare install of Debian Lenny, installing only what I needed I was able to boot into WindowMaker [or XFCE] [via GDM] and load IceWeasel to a google home page in 48 seconds [including time to type in username/passwd].
I used to prefer Xubuntu for notebook/desktop usage, but now it runs so much cruft in the background it takes much longer to boot [1:15ish] and seems slower. Thus I've gone back to Debian.
This is exactly right. As a matter of fact, over the years it's really been a cyclical thing. For a few years, Seagate drives will be great and say WD drives will suck horribly. Then for a few years, Seagate drives will suck and IBM has great drives. Then a few years later, IBM drives suck and Seagate is good again. Though as far as I can remember, Maxtor has always sucked and getting bought by Seagate didn't help.
Anyway, I haven't purchased any drives lately, but due to the 5yr warranty and my past experiences, I've always leaned towards Seagate. I will probably avoid the new 1.5TB Seagate in light of recent events, but most likely in a few years Seagate will have great drives again.
Yeah I've got some more testing to do before I definitively narrow it down to the Windows beta. I just found it interesting timing. If the motherboard has gone bad, I'm going to be sorely disappointed. I've already had one go bad and replaced with a brand-new one once, and just put in the new RAM a month ago.:(
Actually, the public vista beta was a big mess. The private builds after it were better - but Windows 7 beta right now is tons better than both XP and vista betas were. Very stable, compatibility is fine, better performance (than vista).
I like this build.
People have been saying it's very stable. I installed the 64-bit beta on my Quad [Q6600] Sunday morning. By Sunday night I had to reinstall as it had started blue-screening. I hadn't done anything crazy with it. I had installed the updates that windows update presented, a driver for my LCD, and a pre-release nvidia driver. I had installed Avast, Chrome and Combat Arms. I hadn't played CA yet.
I *think* it was the AV software that did it, but I'm not 100% sure. I haven't had the time [or inclination] to test it again and have to reinstall again just yet:). I installed AVG this time around and it seemed to work ok.
Then I put it to sleep. A few hours later when I went to turn it back on, my BIOS had been erased. It came up and said the checksum was bad and I had to reset everything to defaults. This CPU has been running great for a year, and the MB and RAM are about a month old, been running great with Vista and Linux. There's a chance the HW is going bad, but the coincidence seems a bit much for me. Again, I haven't tried putting it to sleep again. I will get a chance to test it this weekend most likely, so we'll see if it happens again.
With that said, I'm tempted to install the 32bit on my EeePC [1000h]. Anyone run it on something similar? How's it working?
Several people have made this "read the odometer" suggestion, and naturally several people have responded with the "I don't want to pay for my trip out of state" argument.
Which would be more cost effective. To set up an entire GPS infrastructure to handle every new car sold [or transferred into] Oregon and keep track of it?
Or to set up check points on the bigger highways that cross the state border? If you live in Oregon and you drive out of the state, you go through the checkpoint and they make a note of your odometer reading. Upon driving back into the state, they read your odometer again and when you go to pay your registration they deduct those miles from the total.
Heck if you do it that way, you could even use it to tax out of state drivers who drive into Oregon. Take odometer readings on entry and exit, and bill them for the miles they drive while in the state. Of course, that might cause people to avoid driving to Oregon.:)
The point is, don't pretend that it's not a workable alternative to forcing all new cars to have GPS installed. At least this way they can't track everywhere you go in your vehicle at any time.
For what it's worth though, I think they should stick with a gas tax, so it doesn't penalize those who choose to have a more fuel efficient vehicle.
My brother received the MMR vaccine in the early 80s and was perfectly healthy up until that point. Silent seizures soon followed and the beginning of many hospital stays. He was on Depekene for years and was we were told by doctors he was unlikely to be able to walk. Today he is able to walk and function although he has many symptoms of autism will never be "normal".
If there is no connection why do we see so many stories similar to mine? Kind of like all the corrupt cop stories. Why do you hear about them constantly if they aren't true?
IANADr, but have you considered the possibility that certain conditions might have a tendency to manifest around the age that children receive these vaccines? If the vast majority of children are getting vaccinated, then odds are that almost every child who exhibits the issues your brother does were vaccinated, perhaps shortly before the onset of those issues. That in no way implies that the vaccine is the cause of the problems.
Though my child [3.5yr old] is mostly healthy thus far, I can empathize with the need a parent might have to find something to point the finger at as the cause of such an unpleasant turn of events.
However, I understand that multiple peer-reviewed studies found no link between MMR and autism. Until there are sufficient peer-reviewed studies that prove otherwise, I'm going to have to believe that your brother's subsequent health issues are just an unfortunate coincidence.
Not true at all. Sharpness of a given lens may be diffraction limited at a given aperture, but that doesn't mean better sensors are worthless! Light sensitivity and dynamic range are the true limiting factors for digital imaging. Any technology that increases either will move digital closer to film, which has been the goal all along.
Not only that but the article mentions the substance being flexible. If the technology is good enough it could be able to curve the sensor in the way that best overcomes the limitations of your cheap lens.
Seeing as how reliable D-Link routers are (based on previous experience) I'd imagine it won't be long.
I dunno, I've been very happy with my DIR-655. It's been the most stable router I've had yet. I've had it for a year and I've only had to reboot it once due to it not responding. The last 3 routers I've owned had to be rebooted weekly at least.
As another mentioned above, I too have been running 1.21 firmware for awhile and I haven't seen any unusual redirects. I might have disabled it when I installed it, I can't recall. I guess I'll have to go doublecheck when I get home.
Hehe... Here's one that will separate the Unix from the pure Linux folks:
killall find
On Linux this will kill all find processes. On another OS it will gleefully kill everything on the system. My favorite response when someone does this on a non-Linux machine: "What did you think kill *all* meant?"
Yeah I got bitten by this one on my first Solaris gig. I was so accustomed to using killall in Linux. Unfortunately I was telnetd in [yeah the guy before me hadn't set up ssh]. Fortunately I was just across the building:) I was like 'wtf did I just do?':)
Exactly. What made "F.E.A.R." great at this wasn't the "startle" moments, or the gore, but scenes that created an air of foreboding. For instance, you walk down a dark hallway and see a vague shape jump around the corner. Go around the corner, and there's nothing there. *That* is what creates the feeling of impending doom, not the fifteenth iteration of "turn lights off, open up closet behind player containing monsters".
I stopped playing Doom 3 when I realized that I had developed an instinctual tick of turning around and firing every time the lights went out.
I never played F.E.A.R, but I got this same feeling playing Quake 4. There was still some of the Doom3-like 'stuff coming up behind me' moments, but there were a few parts of Q4 that just scared the crap out of me.
Like the one level where you're crawling around in some sub-level [not quite a sewer and not quite a dungeon]. It's mostly dark, with some light shining in from the grates above you. As you're walking along trying to find your way out, you hear something skittering about going down different hallways, sometimes seeing a shadow flick by. That scared the crap out of me, never knowing what it was, where it was, or what it was going to do. What made it all worth it, was that it never attacked me as I expected.
There was also the cutscene where your character gets uh, 'converted' or whatever it was called. You've got a 1st person view of your body strapped down in some sort of cart, and you can see the people ahead of you strapped into carts, going along an assembly line of sorts. I was playing this late at night with a good sound system, in the dark. Man when it got to the part where you watched a 3-foot pipe being repeatedly stabbed into the chest of the guy ahead of you, I damn near ran for the door, and when it happened to my character, I swear I felt something enter my chest.
If a game is going to try to scare me, that's the kind of environmental/emotional attachment it has to have for me. Otherwise it's just startling me or throwing out more blood and gore, which just bores me [no pun intended]...
Not quite everything...I'd stay away from Piers Anthony if I were you - especially his Bio of a Space Tyrant. It's full of rape and brutality from start to finish.
I agree, you have to be careful with Anthony. As a young teen I read the Mode series, starting with "Virtual Mode". It was pretty shocking to me at the time how much he went into the main character's [12yrs old] suicidal tendencies [wrist slitting] and sex.
Not that they were bad books, just be aware of what you're getting into, or letting the kids get into.
I know, bad form to reply to myself, but someone else mentioned Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [excellent choice!] and it reminded me of a few other series that I enjoyed in my younger days.
Along a similar humorous vein was the Stainless Steel Rat series by Harry Harrison, and the "Myth" series starting with Another Fine Myth by Robert Asprin.
Once they're a few years older, I'd also HIGHLY recommend A trilogy called "The Deed of Paksenarrion" by Elizabeth Moon [fantasy]. The 2nd book [and beginning of the 3rd] are pretty dark, but once they can get through the Hobbit, they can probably handle those books. The first book is called "Sheepfarmer's Daughter"
It is easily in the top 5 of the best books/series I've ever read.
Slashdot Mirror
I was home sick for two days this week. I spent most of the time watching videos on Hulu and Netflix [via my Xbox360].
I just looked and I've used about 58.5GB in the last week, and that's just incoming data. Granted that was a slightly heavier use week than is normal but over the last month I've averaged about 4.5GB /day. I certainly don't feel that I'm abusing the network. I don't do p2p [very rarely]. I download the occasional Linux ISO, a small amount of backup data from my mail server, some gaming and the Hulu/Netflix watching.
Thankfully I have AT&T DSL [6M/768k @ $35/mo]. They're not nearly as great as Speakeasy [which I sadly can't get here] but at least they're 1000X better than the cable companies.
Just enable IMAP support on the Exchange server, and it will work with any IMAP email client.
Until you get a couple thousand emails in your mailbox. Then Exchange's IMAP server gets ugly and useless. At least that's been my experience.
Not quite. Slashdot has better graphics.
And you don't *have* to pay $35-55/yr to play the multiplayer. :)
Off topic, but if you weren't picky, you wouldn't be complaining about Silverlight. :)
First off - Welcome to Texas!
Thanks for such an insightful comment on the situation of our state government. You are quite correct in you assessment. Texans want to be left alone, and not be harassed by our local, state or even national government.
Except, it seems, when it comes to:
- Buying a car - dealership can only be open ONE day on weekends, Sat or Sun but no both. Most choose to be open on Sat.
- Buying alcohol - Too many dry counties to count. And yet there's drive-thru liquor stores in some areas. WTF?
- Sex Toys - Texans will have a fit if you try to legistlate anything about their ability to own and use a gun [even useful stuff like requiring a farking child lock if you have kids in the home]. But they sure fight like hell to make sure Texas residents don't have access to anything that might make you feel good. Most of the places that can sell sex toys can't actually call them sex toys. They must be sold as 'novelties'. Another sign of blatant hypocrisy: There's more strip-clubs here than I've seen anywhere else I've ever been.
Yeah, these Texans hate the government telling them what to do...
Actually I wonder if this is intentional. My thoughts are that either:
1. This is an April fools joke
2. They are serious, *but* decided to make the announcement a couple weeks before April 1st. The will spend the next weeks gaging the response and if they see that a large number of people are unhappy about the new name, they will come out on April 1st and announce it was an April fools joke.
Pretty slick really. I don't care which it is, as long as April 1st brings announcements that it's a joke. I don't even have cable/dish, but I was thinking of getting something so I could have SciFi. After what I've heard about recent programming [Wrestling? Really?], and this name-change, I don't think I'm going to be rushing out to try to get SciFi/SyFy anytime soon.
I think some of you folks need to double-check your providers or your internal networking. I've only a few times had my movie not start with four bars to my XBOX360 or subsequently reduce quality.
Once my backup machine was doing two backups and overloading my poor little wireless router. I set up QOS to give the Netflix connection priority and it never happened again.
The other few times were because I was using a crappy wireless connection and double NAT [ internet -> router -> wireless-> Media PC w/ICS -> xbox360 wired. ] It's amazing it worked at all. I've since wired the Xbox360 directly to the router and have never failed to get 4 bars and a great picture quality from Netflix or Hulu.
You know there's a setting to make it check for full screen applications before popping up any notices right?
Also, if you register it, the nags go away. It does require you to give them an email address but I've never gotten any other mail from them.
By contrast: one of my sites had 15 minutes of fame, and had 20,000 page views across about three hours. It was running as static content, from a Xen instance, with 1GB of memory, and about 25% of processor time on a dual processor 1GHz system. There wasn't even a hiccup in dealing with the load.
Yeah it all really does depend on the type of load. I don't recall the stats of how many visitors/unique I had but on Sept 11, 2001 when all the major news sites were down I hosted a ton of pictures and video [mostly between 100k-5MB file size], and posted the link here on Slashdot.
My poor little AMD K6-350Mhz with 256MB of RAM and was averaging about 75Mbit/sec outbound for most of the rest of the day.
So if you're just hosting up static content you could probably handle 1000+ visitors a day on a modern cell phone.
Faster boot + login times. Everyone fudges on boot times by declaring that the computer is booted up before it is really ready to use. It takes an additional 10 seconds or so for the GUI environment to initialize and automatic login to finish. And that's without restoring any saved apps.
I time my boot times from the moment I hit the power button until I have displayed www.google.com in a web browser.
Using a bare install of Debian Lenny, installing only what I needed I was able to boot into WindowMaker [or XFCE] [via GDM] and load IceWeasel to a google home page in 48 seconds [including time to type in username/passwd].
I used to prefer Xubuntu for notebook/desktop usage, but now it runs so much cruft in the background it takes much longer to boot [1:15ish] and seems slower. Thus I've gone back to Debian.
This is exactly right. As a matter of fact, over the years it's really been a cyclical thing. For a few years, Seagate drives will be great and say WD drives will suck horribly. Then for a few years, Seagate drives will suck and IBM has great drives. Then a few years later, IBM drives suck and Seagate is good again. Though as far as I can remember, Maxtor has always sucked and getting bought by Seagate didn't help.
Anyway, I haven't purchased any drives lately, but due to the 5yr warranty and my past experiences, I've always leaned towards Seagate. I will probably avoid the new 1.5TB Seagate in light of recent events, but most likely in a few years Seagate will have great drives again.
FYI: I updated the BIOS on my motherboard, and sleep seems to work fine now. It no longer corrupts the BIOS.
Yeah I've got some more testing to do before I definitively narrow it down to the Windows beta. I just found it interesting timing. If the motherboard has gone bad, I'm going to be sorely disappointed. I've already had one go bad and replaced with a brand-new one once, and just put in the new RAM a month ago. :(
CPU: Q6600
MB: Asus P5QC
RAM: Patriot Viper - DDR2-800 4GB 2x2GB
"the vista betas worked really well too.
Actually, the public vista beta was a big mess. The private builds after it were better - but Windows 7 beta right now is tons better than both XP and vista betas were. Very stable, compatibility is fine, better performance (than vista).
I like this build.
People have been saying it's very stable. I installed the 64-bit beta on my Quad [Q6600] Sunday morning. By Sunday night I had to reinstall as it had started blue-screening. I hadn't done anything crazy with it. I had installed the updates that windows update presented, a driver for my LCD, and a pre-release nvidia driver. I had installed Avast, Chrome and Combat Arms. I hadn't played CA yet.
I *think* it was the AV software that did it, but I'm not 100% sure. I haven't had the time [or inclination] to test it again and have to reinstall again just yet :). I installed AVG this time around and it seemed to work ok.
Then I put it to sleep. A few hours later when I went to turn it back on, my BIOS had been erased. It came up and said the checksum was bad and I had to reset everything to defaults. This CPU has been running great for a year, and the MB and RAM are about a month old, been running great with Vista and Linux. There's a chance the HW is going bad, but the coincidence seems a bit much for me. Again, I haven't tried putting it to sleep again. I will get a chance to test it this weekend most likely, so we'll see if it happens again.
With that said, I'm tempted to install the 32bit on my EeePC [1000h]. Anyone run it on something similar? How's it working?
Several people have made this "read the odometer" suggestion, and naturally several people have responded with the "I don't want to pay for my trip out of state" argument.
Which would be more cost effective. To set up an entire GPS infrastructure to handle every new car sold [or transferred into] Oregon and keep track of it?
Or to set up check points on the bigger highways that cross the state border? If you live in Oregon and you drive out of the state, you go through the checkpoint and they make a note of your odometer reading. Upon driving back into the state, they read your odometer again and when you go to pay your registration they deduct those miles from the total.
Heck if you do it that way, you could even use it to tax out of state drivers who drive into Oregon. Take odometer readings on entry and exit, and bill them for the miles they drive while in the state. :)
Of course, that might cause people to avoid driving to Oregon.
The point is, don't pretend that it's not a workable alternative to forcing all new cars to have GPS installed. At least this way they can't track everywhere you go in your vehicle at any time.
For what it's worth though, I think they should stick with a gas tax, so it doesn't penalize those who choose to have a more fuel efficient vehicle.
You mean how I have to pay extra to NOT have any long distance attached to my phone at all? Grrr...
Actually, Malta is there. It's that teeeny little pinkish/purplish splotch at the end of the red GO-1 line.
My brother received the MMR vaccine in the early 80s and was perfectly healthy up until that point. Silent seizures soon followed and the beginning of many hospital stays. He was on Depekene for years and was we were told by doctors he was unlikely to be able to walk. Today he is able to walk and function although he has many symptoms of autism will never be "normal".
If there is no connection why do we see so many stories similar to mine? Kind of like all the corrupt cop stories. Why do you hear about them constantly if they aren't true?
IANADr, but have you considered the possibility that certain conditions might have a tendency to manifest around the age that children receive these vaccines? If the vast majority of children are getting vaccinated, then odds are that almost every child who exhibits the issues your brother does were vaccinated, perhaps shortly before the onset of those issues. That in no way implies that the vaccine is the cause of the problems.
Though my child [3.5yr old] is mostly healthy thus far, I can empathize with the need a parent might have to find something to point the finger at as the cause of such an unpleasant turn of events.
However, I understand that multiple peer-reviewed studies found no link between MMR and autism. Until there are sufficient peer-reviewed studies that prove otherwise, I'm going to have to believe that your brother's subsequent health issues are just an unfortunate coincidence.
Not true at all. Sharpness of a given lens may be diffraction limited at a given aperture, but that doesn't mean better sensors are worthless! Light sensitivity and dynamic range are the true limiting factors for digital imaging. Any technology that increases either will move digital closer to film, which has been the goal all along.
Not only that but the article mentions the substance being flexible. If the technology is good enough it could be able to curve the sensor in the way that best overcomes the limitations of your cheap lens.
Seeing as how reliable D-Link routers are (based on previous experience) I'd imagine it won't be long.
I dunno, I've been very happy with my DIR-655. It's been the most stable router I've had yet. I've had it for a year and I've only had to reboot it once due to it not responding. The last 3 routers I've owned had to be rebooted weekly at least.
As another mentioned above, I too have been running 1.21 firmware for awhile and I haven't seen any unusual redirects. I might have disabled it when I installed it, I can't recall. I guess I'll have to go doublecheck when I get home.
Hehe... Here's one that will separate the Unix from the pure Linux folks:
killall find
On Linux this will kill all find processes. On another OS it will gleefully kill everything on the system. My favorite response when someone does this on a non-Linux machine: "What did you think kill *all* meant?"
Yeah I got bitten by this one on my first Solaris gig. I was so accustomed to using killall in Linux. Unfortunately I was telnetd in [yeah the guy before me hadn't set up ssh]. Fortunately I was just across the building :) I was like 'wtf did I just do?' :)
Now I know to use 'pkill'.
Exactly. What made "F.E.A.R." great at this wasn't the "startle" moments, or the gore, but scenes that created an air of foreboding. For instance, you walk down a dark hallway and see a vague shape jump around the corner. Go around the corner, and there's nothing there. *That* is what creates the feeling of impending doom, not the fifteenth iteration of "turn lights off, open up closet behind player containing monsters".
I stopped playing Doom 3 when I realized that I had developed an instinctual tick of turning around and firing every time the lights went out.
I never played F.E.A.R, but I got this same feeling playing Quake 4. There was still some of the Doom3-like 'stuff coming up behind me' moments, but there were a few parts of Q4 that just scared the crap out of me.
Like the one level where you're crawling around in some sub-level [not quite a sewer and not quite a dungeon]. It's mostly dark, with some light shining in from the grates above you. As you're walking along trying to find your way out, you hear something skittering about going down different hallways, sometimes seeing a shadow flick by. That scared the crap out of me, never knowing what it was, where it was, or what it was going to do. What made it all worth it, was that it never attacked me as I expected.
There was also the cutscene where your character gets uh, 'converted' or whatever it was called. You've got a 1st person view of your body strapped down in some sort of cart, and you can see the people ahead of you strapped into carts, going along an assembly line of sorts. I was playing this late at night with a good sound system, in the dark.
Man when it got to the part where you watched a 3-foot pipe being repeatedly stabbed into the chest of the guy ahead of you, I damn near ran for the door, and when it happened to my character, I swear I felt something enter my chest.
If a game is going to try to scare me, that's the kind of environmental/emotional attachment it has to have for me. Otherwise it's just startling me or throwing out more blood and gore, which just bores me [no pun intended]...
Ooh, excellent choice on the Wringle in Time books! I can't believe I didn't think of them myself.
Awesome Series!!!
Also, you inadvertantly reminded me of another humorous set of books that started with "Castle Perilous" by John de Chancie.
Man I live these 'suggest a book' threads. They always give me new ideas, and bring back old favorites I hadn't thought of in years. :)
Not quite everything...I'd stay away from Piers Anthony if I were you - especially his Bio of a Space Tyrant. It's full of rape and brutality from start to finish.
I agree, you have to be careful with Anthony. As a young teen I read the Mode series, starting with "Virtual Mode". It was pretty shocking to me at the time how much he went into the main character's [12yrs old] suicidal tendencies [wrist slitting] and sex.
Not that they were bad books, just be aware of what you're getting into, or letting the kids get into.
I know, bad form to reply to myself, but someone else mentioned Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy [excellent choice!] and it reminded me of a few other series that I enjoyed in my younger days.
Along a similar humorous vein was the Stainless Steel Rat series by Harry Harrison, and the "Myth" series starting with Another Fine Myth by Robert Asprin.
Once they're a few years older, I'd also HIGHLY recommend A trilogy called "The Deed of Paksenarrion" by Elizabeth Moon [fantasy]. The 2nd book [and beginning of the 3rd] are pretty dark, but once they can get through the Hobbit, they can probably handle those books. The first book is called "Sheepfarmer's Daughter"
It is easily in the top 5 of the best books/series I've ever read.