I'm distressed to see the North Pole Navigation Services considers Russia a better place to do business. Once again our socialist policies have forced another world class Canada company to relocate to friendlier climes.
Good God! I just realized -- we could lose the Santa Claus Toy Manufacturing plants as well!
I would submit the expert 'C' programmer requires only one, 'C: A Reference Manual' by Samuel P. Harbison and Guy L. Steele.
It's a guide to both ANSI and K&R C, it has cool useful tables and an excellent index.
Not a good "learn C" book. To learn C go through K&R and then Software Tools by Plauger and Kernighan. When I say go through I mean read and implement the examples, play around with them.
My wife and I have three copies of K&R (two 1st and second editions) and two copies of Harbison and Steele (2nd/4th) and the Harbison and Steele books are falling apart...
I don't think the issue will be with buying the initial version of Windows/Office but the ongoing licensing fees. For a middle class family a computer is a big purchase and it has to last 4 or 5 years. It's hard enough to afford the internet connection without then adding yearly MS fees.
I think by trying to extort the maximum amount they can out of there business users Microsoft is going to be in the position of eliminating themselves from the consumer market.
The interesting thing is that at some point companies like GE are going to realize that the millions of dollars a year in licensing fees could hire a lot of Linux developers to work on StarOffice and Redhat. And since most of their internal process control/CRM software is going web based all they need is a browser.
These two things could force MS into the position of needed to compete with Liberty/J2EE for it's very survival.
I downloaded the Adobe eBook reader last year and received a FREE! FREE! FREE! eBook from Adobe, Unleashing The Ideavirus, for my trouble. This may have something to do with why it's the most downloaded book in history (according to the author:-). A couple of weeks later I went to read it and found my "key" had expired and I could no longer read the megabytes of data on
my hard drive.
Surprise, a book with a best before date!
I sent email to Adobe asking them if this is how all of their eBooks worked and have yet to receive a reply.
I certainly learned something about eBooks from this experience, not sure if it's the lesson Adobe wanted me to learn when they offered the FREE! FREE! FREE! eBook...
I love books, I read them several times, I lend them to friends. I've lent books to my nephew as he grew up and I look forward to the day when my own kids will read my Heinlein Juvies, Asimov's Lucky Starr series, and when they will be old enough to read Dune, LotR, and finally, when they are mature enough to "get" it, Bradbury and Zelazny.
I shudder to think of my Heinlein collection suddenly disappearing in a poof of license expiries or half of my Clark collection going bankrupt or Adobe deciding not to support my James Campbell on Windows ZP due to a lack of interest.
The concept of trusting things I love this much to a protected and encrypted and transient medium is just plain abhorent to me.
I would aim to use the PDA's for communication. Create a symbolic computer language and use it to run/program the PDA's and communicate between participants.
Base it on things like the Logo programming language and efforts to teach great apes to communicate using symbols. Smart kids should
be able to pick up 2000 symbols in a couple
of days.
Don't go with a written language -- you're going to have problems with the basic idioms if you do (Oriental languages vs. Arabic and Hebrew vs. Romance languages). Everybody understands symbols and pictures.
Two days is not nearly enough time to become proficient -- you're going to have to get these PDA's with the symbolic language installed to the particpants weeks in advance.
Mostly, keep it simple -- don't try invent Esparanto for the PDA...
Keep it fun, these kids are going to be trying to connect and communicate, don't allow them to withdraw into playing with their PDA's.
One of my favourite technical books is "C: A Reference Manual" by Harbison and Steele.
If you are/were a C programmer this is THE book -- dense, descriptive, well indexed and CORRECT. Lot of tables and figures. Packed with useful data.
This book assumed you were a professional programmer from the beginning and didn't pull any punches. The phrase "beyond the scope of this book" was irrelevant -- this was the complete guide to C and nothing was missing. Since it assumed a skilled programmer it also managed to stay at a couple of hundred pages.
I want this book for Java/C++/JSP/C#/etc. If you make books like this I will buy them.
Don't forget muscle memory -- I can flip to within 2 or 3 pages of the section and page I want -- can't do that on a website or with an e-book, even with bookmarks or search engines.
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Good God! I just realized -- we could lose the Santa Claus Toy Manufacturing plants as well!
The ignominy of it all.
I would submit the expert 'C' programmer requires only one, 'C: A Reference Manual' by Samuel P. Harbison and Guy L. Steele.
...
It's a guide to both ANSI and K&R C, it has cool useful tables and an excellent index.
Not a good "learn C" book. To learn C go through K&R and then Software Tools by Plauger
and Kernighan. When I say go through I mean read and implement the examples, play around with them.
My wife and I have three copies of K&R (two 1st and second editions) and two copies of Harbison and Steele (2nd/4th) and the Harbison and Steele books are falling apart
I think by trying to extort the maximum amount they can out of there business users Microsoft is going to be in the position of eliminating themselves from the consumer market.
The interesting thing is that at some point companies like GE are going to realize that the millions of dollars a year in licensing fees could hire a lot of Linux developers to work on StarOffice and Redhat. And since most of their internal process control/CRM software is going web based all they need is a browser.
These two things could force MS into the position of needed to compete with Liberty/J2EE for it's very survival.
Well, I can dream.
Surprise, a book with a best before date!
I sent email to Adobe asking them if this is how all of their eBooks worked and have yet to receive a reply.
I certainly learned something about eBooks from this experience, not sure if it's the lesson Adobe wanted me to learn when they offered the FREE! FREE! FREE! eBook ...
I love books, I read them several times, I lend them to friends. I've lent books to my nephew as he grew up and I look forward to the day when my own kids will read my Heinlein Juvies, Asimov's Lucky Starr series, and when they will be old enough to read Dune, LotR, and finally, when they are mature enough to "get" it, Bradbury and Zelazny.
I shudder to think of my Heinlein collection suddenly disappearing in a poof of license expiries or half of my Clark collection going bankrupt or Adobe deciding not to support my James Campbell on Windows ZP due to a lack of interest.
The concept of trusting things I love this much to a protected and encrypted and transient medium is just plain abhorent to me.
This does happen with things like drugs even at such prestigous institutions as Sick Kids Hospital in Toronto.
I would aim to use the PDA's for communication. Create a symbolic computer language and use it to run/program the PDA's and communicate between participants.
...
Base it on things like the Logo programming language and efforts to teach great apes to communicate using symbols. Smart kids should
be able to pick up 2000 symbols in a couple
of days.
Don't go with a written language -- you're going to have problems with the basic idioms if you do (Oriental languages vs. Arabic and Hebrew vs. Romance languages). Everybody understands symbols and pictures.
Two days is not nearly enough time to become proficient -- you're going to have to get these PDA's with the symbolic language installed to the particpants weeks in advance.
Mostly, keep it simple -- don't try invent Esparanto for the PDA
Keep it fun, these kids are going to be trying to connect and communicate, don't allow them to withdraw into playing with their PDA's.
One of my favourite technical books is "C: A Reference Manual" by Harbison and Steele.
If you are/were a C programmer this is THE book -- dense, descriptive, well indexed and CORRECT. Lot of tables and figures. Packed with useful data.
This book assumed you were a professional programmer from the beginning and didn't pull any punches. The phrase "beyond the scope of this book" was irrelevant -- this was the complete guide to C and nothing was missing. Since it assumed a skilled programmer it also managed to stay at a couple of hundred pages.
I want this book for Java/C++/JSP/C#/etc. If you make books like this I will buy them.
Don't forget muscle memory -- I can flip to within 2 or 3 pages of the section and page I want -- can't do that on a website or with an e-book, even with bookmarks or search engines.
So it's an Ipod with more disk, faster chip, no firewire, bigger, no lcd or interface.
...
But it is a general purpose computer.
And it's two years away
*yawn*
This is a great Ask Slashdot question -- think of how many /.'s will now get NDA's signed with their Beta Testers ...
The purpose of Ask Slashdot is to educate the readers as much as the poser!