A couple that aren't usually thought of as sci-fi but would be if they were publiished today: "Utopia" by Thomas More, and Swift's "Gulliver's Travels". As far as more modern books go, one of my favorites, for it's great plotting and incredibly prescient imagining of an information web, is "Shockwave Rider", by John Brunner.
Bought my first memory expansion card - 16K board (with about 16K chips on it!) - from Godbout Electronics for $385. Used Michael Shrayer's Electric Pencil, which doubled my productivity as a writer (all supsequent productivity increases have added perhaps another 40%). Learned to program in Z80 Assembler; BASIC was second language. Tom Pittman's Tiny BASIC loaded from cassette tape, was full-featured integer BASIC with integrated program editor, that ran in 5K memory. Bought it in 1978; founded WBK ad agency in '79 (by that time, computer had been upgraded with 2 8" floppy disk drives); switched to Heath/Zenith Z89 a year or so later; by 1991, when I sold out, we had 75 Macs networked, all under control of one guy who spent 25% of his time on net management and the rest doing graphic design.
I set up a wireless system at the Brew House in Cincinnati, which gets a fair amount of use and which has helped bring new customers into a neat neighborhood bar. When we first set the system up, we had all sorts of rules and regulations, and we were putting considerable effort into keeping track of who was allowed to use the system and making sure that users were "registered". We dropped all that, because it just wasn't worth it. Our costs for the connection are fixed, and the more people who use it, the better we like it. Now there are just four rules: keep it legal, keep it clean, keep it civil, and have fun. And we rely on the honor system to enforce those.
With regard to 'g' vs 'b' standards, the only purpose for the wireless router in a pub or cafe is to connect to the Internet, and a faster network doesn't improve that connection. Even at cable modem speeds, the Internet connection is still considerably slower than an 802.11b LAN.
For the Brewhouse system, we scavenged a couple of old PCs from customers and loaded Linux on them, and we got a wireless router on sale at MicroCenter for $40. The cost of a business connection to our local cable is the most significant cost we incur, and the proprietor thinks that is worth the buzz it creates, even if it didn't attract new customers.
I've been pretty determined to force myself to settle on Mandrake, but books particularly about that distro are few and far between, and not too meaty. Would these books, especially the Unleashed book, be helpful to a person, not a newbie any more, but hardly a guru yet, who's trying to make the most out of a few not very demanding installations - a couple of low-volume deadicated servers, an MP3 jukebox, a couple of public machines in an internet cafe. Just curious about how much help I could expect, and whether the book would send me off on very many wild goose chases (drake chases?).
Richard
In Neil Stephenson's great nanotech novel The Diamond Age, the diseases caused by the spread of nano-agents in the atmosphere caused a major public health problem, with a widespread epidemic of life-threatening asthma caused by inhalation of the agents.
Before the Osborne I, before the Sol 20, before any microcomputer except maybe the Altair and the Imsai, Adam wrote and published a book called, iirc, "An Introduction to the Microprocessor", which was one of the more influential books in my life. It was really an introduction to computing technology in general, using the 8080 (or maybe Z80) microprocessor as a model. It got into subjects like binary number systems, how the registers and the CPU in a microprocessor chip work together, how memory is accessed, and how computers do basic arithmetic. It was very clearly written and, to me, incredibly enlightening. It was the combination of Adam's book and Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" upside-down twofer that stimulated me to buy a Sol 20 that a friend had assembled from a kit and start learning Assembler.
"When government does stuff private businesses do, everyone pays for it, even the people who don't want it. That's wrong...."
Governments build roads, and maintain police and fire departments, and in some cities operate health clinics, and operate schools - all services which, in other ages or other places or other circumstances, have been done by private businesses. There is an argument to be made that universal access to high bandwidth connections to the Internet strengthens the society, even for those who don't happen to take advantage of it right now or who really believe that they'll never want it. It's that argument that justifies government action in this arena.
I've got four computers set up in a relatively small (about 9' x 13') office, and after a number of different attempts (I've been working at this home-office-with-multiple-computers thing for close to 20 years), I've settled on a solution that seems to work.
Everything is modular, no bigger than it needs to be, and on wheels.
Every computer gets its own desk. As small as possible, with as few gimmicks as possible - no CD towers, no printer shelves, no cubbyholes; the only thing I'll accept, if the desk isn't low enough already, is a keyboard shelf, and that has to be wide and deep. It has to be on wheels. The ones I've come to like are the very simple little rolling workstation platforms that you can find at most computer or office superstores for about $60 - basically a flat desktop with a keyboard drawer and a bottom shelf to stash the tower.
Then I have one adjustable height folding table - Sam's for about $40 - about 30" deep x 72" wide; I've set that at a convenient keyboard height, and I usually have a laptop or two set up there. But it's easy to take the laptops off and set up a tower/monitor/keyboard at a convenient height for setup, modification, debugging. I've also got my DSL router, network switch, and a couple of power blocks velcro'd to that table at one end toward the back.
Then I've picked up a couple of sets of lovely maple folding tv tables - four tables, plus a stand, for typically $20-30 bucks. I've got a scanner more or less permanently set on one, and a printer on another. The others come and go as my need for horizontal space grows and shrinks.
Add one of those plastic 4-drawer cabinets (any office superstore, about $20-30) and a couple of file crates with wheels that live under the laptop table when I'm not actively working with them, and a bookshelf on one wall, and I've got a very efficient and flexible workspace!
Remember the three M's of home office furniture - Modular, Minimal, and Mobile.
Did they link directly to the WSJ story, or to MSNBC's report on that story? The difference is significant; as the Register points out, MSNBC, in reporting on the WSJ story, altered the story significantly to remove material offensive to their masters. For example, the following line appeared in the WSJ story, "Microsoft said that since last summer, Hotmail has been running on both Windows 2000 and the Solaris operating system from Sun Microsystems Inc." MSNBC altered that to read "Microsoft said Hotmail has been running on Windows since last summer."
After the story was noticed, the original copy was restored.
One of the most interesting lines in the NYT article concerned MIT's expectation of how others might hook in to their Open CourseWare initiative: " it will offer course materials as ingredients of learning that can then be combined with teacher-student interaction somewhere else -- or simply explored by, say, professors in Chile or precocious high school students in Bangladesh."
Here's my thought: Slashdot, with the best moderated discussions on the web, would be in a great position to offer a brokering service for that "teacher-student interaction" that the article talks about. It's fine to have MIT course materials on the web, but it would be really neat to be able to sign up as a registered participant in an online discussion, using Slashdot software, moderated by a Slashdot-experienced moderator, and based on a particular MIT course.
Such a scheme would offer people who have developed significant expertise in a particular technology or mastered some complex body of knowledge to contribute to the community in a structured way, either as a course guide, or a discussion moderator, or even as a grader for those participants who chose to take the tests and submit papers.
That sort of extension of an idea is what really gives Open Source its power. It's not just that Linus releases the source for the kernal, but that thousands of people build on that release to create very specifically useful systems.
Although both Perl and Python have claims to be cross-platform, the only version of Perl available for the Macintosh is still based on Perl 1.5 and was last revised (I think) in the mid-'50's. Python's Mac development, on the other hand, has pretty well kept up with Python development on other platforms; I can develop on the Mac using all the features of Python 2 - object methods for strings, auto-increment operators, and others - and the code runs just fine on my FreeBSD server and my Win98 machine.
Aside from the platform issue (which is important to me), I find Python clean and easy to learn. And while there is no Python book nearly as good as Programming Perl (the O'Reilly Python books, including version 2 of Programming Python, suck, imho), Python's online docs, largely written by Guido, are the best I've ever seen for a programming language.
I think that any correlation you find between academic achievement and the ability to learn video game skills would be pretty uninteresting (unless the correlation is very low, which would be surprising and suspect).
A more interesting correlation, I think, would be between a student's current and past involvement with video games and his or her academic rank. You could get at that via a survey:
What games do you play? How often do you play them?
How long have you been playing?
Is there an objective measure of success in those games; if so, what is your level of play?
How would you rank your skill as a player at each of games you play?
And so forth. Then you could draw some interesting and potentially helpful correlations between the profiles of students as game-players and their profiles as academic achievers.
Against that background, a measure of their ability to learn game-playing skills at a game they've never played before could, in fact, become interesting.
I was running a Processor Tech Sol 20, with a Radio Shack cassette recorder as my mass storage device (using, iirc, the "Kansas City" interface). I learned programming with a copy of Tom Pittman's "Tiny Basic", a full-featured integer BASIC with an integrated program text editor that ran in 5 K of memory. (That's 'K', as in "kilobytes"!) It took almost five minutes to load.
My favorite neglected sci-fi novel is John Brunner's "The Shockwave Rider". In it, Brunner paints an amazingly prescient picture (the novel was published in the early '70's) of a society linked by a world-wide computer network, and he intuits all of the anxieties and opportunities for conflict that such a society presents - information overload, network viruses, the disolution of community. It's a fast-paced story, well plotted, with appealing characters and a welcome, and mostly believable, upbeat ending.
I'd also suggest, especially for a 13-year old girl, Madeleine L'Engle's wonderful series of books for young adults; I don't remember all of the titles, but "A Wrinkle in Time" and "The Arms of the Starfish" were two that my kids devoured with pleasure when they were about that age (and that I read with no less pleasure).
Finally, and again with an eye to the youth and gender of the reader, I'd recommend almost anything by Ursula LeGuin. My personal favorite is "The Dispossessed", in which she presents a very believable contrast between a world poor in resources but rich in the character and strength of its people, and a world like Earth, whose people are blind to the riches bestowed upon them. LeGuinn's Earthsea series is aimed particularly at the young adult market. Again, I enjoyed those thoroughly, reading them as an old adult.
What a wonderful thing to contemplate, being 13 and just beginning to dig into such a sumptuous feast. Enjoy!
I am outraged that you are using your army of attorneys and a very dubious patent to prevent another vendor from providing me with decent service. Please check my order history with Amazon.com; you will find that I have been a frequent and loyal customer, and that I have just cancelled the two orders I have had pending with you. I will order those books, and any future books that I purchase online, from B&N. Please cancel my Amazon.com account.
The reply I received was predictable: sorry to lose you, fuck you. Their reply repeated the ridiculous claim regarding the "innovative and unique nature of the 2-click technology" and included the following:
Amazon.com spent thousands of hours to develop the 1-Click process. As our founder, Jeff Bezos, has said, "The reason we have a patent system in this country is to encourage people to take these kinds of risks and make these kinds of investments for customers."
The problem I've had since I made my principled stand is that no one else comes close to Amazon in the completeness and timeliness of their database or the seamless intelligence of their user interface. Twice now I've gone to B&N looking for something and failed to find it (in one case it involved Sanscrit epic literature; in the other, a moderately obscure translation of the I Ching). In both cases, I found what I was looking for at Amazon.com. Thoroughly frustrating!
I applaud RMS's call for a mass action to call Amason's attention to how strongly this community, at least, feels about their bullying tactics. But you don't want to threaten a boycott unless you're prepared to follow through on it. And right now, Amazon offers a level and a quality of service that no one else comes close to.
I think that a more appropriate response from the hacker community might be to look for a way to educate the courts that will be ruling on Amazon's claim regarding the non-innovative, non-unique nature of the "1-click technology", in the hopes that the courts will reverse the Patent Office's foolishness. That strategy worked pretty well last year to counter the stupidity embodied in the Telecommunications Decency Act, and it might work again to counter the stupidity of the Patent Office.
You've nailed the problem: any communications channel supported by advertising owes more to any individual advertiser than to any individual reader and more to its advertisers as a group than to its readers. Every choice made by the editors and publishers of an advertising-supported medium is suspect - the choice of what topics to cover, what writers to hire, how and how much to slant content. So it follows logically that a magazine supported by its readers would be more trustworthy than one supported by advertising. But we're a long way from figuring out how to do that. A lot of events - not only in the world of computers - are leading to the notion that we need a new model of funding journalism. Perhaps we could put some pressure on corporations and a few internet millionaires to endow journalistic media; a magazine with an endowment of a few million dollars could charge a modest amount for print copies and publish free online versions without having to accept advertising. Perhaps it could run an annual fund-raising drive, like public broadcasting stations do, to beef up its operating budget. A modestly endowed journal could pay reporters and editors well, and we could look to the internet, and especially open source software efforts, for models of how such an endowed enterprise might be effectively governed.
One of the neatest things about the Internet (or at least a small corner of it) is how Usenet heirarchies vote on proposed new groups. Anyone can vote; votes are counted by a vote-counting program, and the voting occurs over a period of time, typically a month. During that period, any individual voter (i.e. email address) can vote as often as s/he likes; at the end of the voting period, only the most recent vote counts. As we head into what promises to be the longest presidential campaign in history, that technique has some considerable appeal. Assuming that issues of fraud and equal access can be solved (big assumptions, granted), a voting period that covers the month of October and that's handled a la Usenet could present a couple of benefits. It could involve people more intensely in the process. If I've voted, but knew that I could reverse or alter my vote, then I think that I'd be more attentive to the issues and the behavior of the candidates than I am under the current system. The candidates, too, would have to watch their steps more closely. A candidate who is leading dramatically in the polls could still lose it if some dramatic act by his opponent or a gaffe by himself could trigger a large flurry of last-minute vote changes.
I think it's outrageous that amazon is using its army of lawyers plus a very dubious patent to force another vendor to limit the services that vendor offers me. I just cancelled the two orders I had pending at amazon, asked them to cancel my account, opened an account at bn.com and placed my orders there.
Tom Case, at Debco Computers in Cincinnati, has had them for a little under $2K. I recommended one to a friend who was going to be trekking through Nepal and Thailand for three months. They're cute, but the keyboard, imo, is too small for serious work. Amazingly good screen display, tho - a little screen, little pixels, but full 800x600 display, quite bright and readable.
Slashdot Mirror
A couple that aren't usually thought of as sci-fi but would be if they were publiished today: "Utopia" by Thomas More, and Swift's "Gulliver's Travels". As far as more modern books go, one of my favorites, for it's great plotting and incredibly prescient imagining of an information web, is "Shockwave Rider", by John Brunner.
About 13.75 billion years ago, actually.
Bought my first memory expansion card - 16K board (with about 16K chips on it!) - from Godbout Electronics for $385. Used Michael Shrayer's Electric Pencil, which doubled my productivity as a writer (all supsequent productivity increases have added perhaps another 40%). Learned to program in Z80 Assembler; BASIC was second language. Tom Pittman's Tiny BASIC loaded from cassette tape, was full-featured integer BASIC with integrated program editor, that ran in 5K memory. Bought it in 1978; founded WBK ad agency in '79 (by that time, computer had been upgraded with 2 8" floppy disk drives); switched to Heath/Zenith Z89 a year or so later; by 1991, when I sold out, we had 75 Macs networked, all under control of one guy who spent 25% of his time on net management and the rest doing graphic design.
Richard
I set up a wireless system at the Brew House in Cincinnati, which gets a fair amount of use and which has helped bring new customers into a neat neighborhood bar. When we first set the system up, we had all sorts of rules and regulations, and we were putting considerable effort into keeping track of who was allowed to use the system and making sure that users were "registered". We dropped all that, because it just wasn't worth it. Our costs for the connection are fixed, and the more people who use it, the better we like it. Now there are just four rules: keep it legal, keep it clean, keep it civil, and have fun. And we rely on the honor system to enforce those.
With regard to 'g' vs 'b' standards, the only purpose for the wireless router in a pub or cafe is to connect to the Internet, and a faster network doesn't improve that connection. Even at cable modem speeds, the Internet connection is still considerably slower than an 802.11b LAN.
For the Brewhouse system, we scavenged a couple of old PCs from customers and loaded Linux on them, and we got a wireless router on sale at MicroCenter for $40. The cost of a business connection to our local cable is the most significant cost we incur, and the proprietor thinks that is worth the buzz it creates, even if it didn't attract new customers.
Richard
I've been pretty determined to force myself to settle on Mandrake, but books particularly about that distro are few and far between, and not too meaty. Would these books, especially the Unleashed book, be helpful to a person, not a newbie any more, but hardly a guru yet, who's trying to make the most out of a few not very demanding installations - a couple of low-volume deadicated servers, an MP3 jukebox, a couple of public machines in an internet cafe. Just curious about how much help I could expect, and whether the book would send me off on very many wild goose chases (drake chases?). Richard
In Neil Stephenson's great nanotech novel The Diamond Age, the diseases caused by the spread of nano-agents in the atmosphere caused a major public health problem, with a widespread epidemic of life-threatening asthma caused by inhalation of the agents.
Before the Osborne I, before the Sol 20, before any microcomputer except maybe the Altair and the Imsai, Adam wrote and published a book called, iirc, "An Introduction to the Microprocessor", which was one of the more influential books in my life. It was really an introduction to computing technology in general, using the 8080 (or maybe Z80) microprocessor as a model. It got into subjects like binary number systems, how the registers and the CPU in a microprocessor chip work together, how memory is accessed, and how computers do basic arithmetic. It was very clearly written and, to me, incredibly enlightening. It was the combination of Adam's book and Ted Nelson's "Computer Lib/Dream Machines" upside-down twofer that stimulated me to buy a Sol 20 that a friend had assembled from a kit and start learning Assembler.
Richard
Imagine!
No. Sorry. No looking back. There was no golden age. Privacy has been replaced by security. We are shutting down your blog....
"When government does stuff private businesses do, everyone pays for it, even the people who don't want it. That's wrong...."
Governments build roads, and maintain police and fire departments, and in some cities operate health clinics, and operate schools - all services which, in other ages or other places or other circumstances, have been done by private businesses. There is an argument to be made that universal access to high bandwidth connections to the Internet strengthens the society, even for those who don't happen to take advantage of it right now or who really believe that they'll never want it. It's that argument that justifies government action in this arena.
Richard
I've got four computers set up in a relatively small (about 9' x 13') office, and after a number of different attempts (I've been working at this home-office-with-multiple-computers thing for close to 20 years), I've settled on a solution that seems to work.
Everything is modular, no bigger than it needs to be, and on wheels.
Every computer gets its own desk. As small as possible, with as few gimmicks as possible - no CD towers, no printer shelves, no cubbyholes; the only thing I'll accept, if the desk isn't low enough already, is a keyboard shelf, and that has to be wide and deep. It has to be on wheels. The ones I've come to like are the very simple little rolling workstation platforms that you can find at most computer or office superstores for about $60 - basically a flat desktop with a keyboard drawer and a bottom shelf to stash the tower.
Then I have one adjustable height folding table - Sam's for about $40 - about 30" deep x 72" wide; I've set that at a convenient keyboard height, and I usually have a laptop or two set up there. But it's easy to take the laptops off and set up a tower/monitor/keyboard at a convenient height for setup, modification, debugging. I've also got my DSL router, network switch, and a couple of power blocks velcro'd to that table at one end toward the back.
Then I've picked up a couple of sets of lovely maple folding tv tables - four tables, plus a stand, for typically $20-30 bucks. I've got a scanner more or less permanently set on one, and a printer on another. The others come and go as my need for horizontal space grows and shrinks.
Add one of those plastic 4-drawer cabinets (any office superstore, about $20-30) and a couple of file crates with wheels that live under the laptop table when I'm not actively working with them, and a bookshelf on one wall, and I've got a very efficient and flexible workspace!
Remember the three M's of home office furniture - Modular, Minimal, and Mobile.
Good luck.
Richard
After the story was noticed, the original copy was restored.
Maya
Here's my thought: Slashdot, with the best moderated discussions on the web, would be in a great position to offer a brokering service for that "teacher-student interaction" that the article talks about. It's fine to have MIT course materials on the web, but it would be really neat to be able to sign up as a registered participant in an online discussion, using Slashdot software, moderated by a Slashdot-experienced moderator, and based on a particular MIT course.
Such a scheme would offer people who have developed significant expertise in a particular technology or mastered some complex body of knowledge to contribute to the community in a structured way, either as a course guide, or a discussion moderator, or even as a grader for those participants who chose to take the tests and submit papers.
That sort of extension of an idea is what really gives Open Source its power. It's not just that Linus releases the source for the kernal, but that thousands of people build on that release to create very specifically useful systems.
"Where did you learn all that stuff?"
"I took the MIT courses on Slashdot!"
Maya
Aside from the platform issue (which is important to me), I find Python clean and easy to learn. And while there is no Python book nearly as good as Programming Perl (the O'Reilly Python books, including version 2 of Programming Python, suck, imho), Python's online docs, largely written by Guido, are the best I've ever seen for a programming language.
A more interesting correlation, I think, would be between a student's current and past involvement with video games and his or her academic rank. You could get at that via a survey:
And so forth. Then you could draw some interesting and potentially helpful correlations between the profiles of students as game-players and their profiles as academic achievers.
Against that background, a measure of their ability to learn game-playing skills at a game they've never played before could, in fact, become interesting.
Richard
Wow, it brings back memories...
I'd also suggest, especially for a 13-year old girl, Madeleine L'Engle's wonderful series of books for young adults; I don't remember all of the titles, but "A Wrinkle in Time" and "The Arms of the Starfish" were two that my kids devoured with pleasure when they were about that age (and that I read with no less pleasure).
Finally, and again with an eye to the youth and gender of the reader, I'd recommend almost anything by Ursula LeGuin. My personal favorite is "The Dispossessed", in which she presents a very believable contrast between a world poor in resources but rich in the character and strength of its people, and a world like Earth, whose people are blind to the riches bestowed upon them. LeGuinn's Earthsea series is aimed particularly at the young adult market. Again, I enjoyed those thoroughly, reading them as an old adult.
What a wonderful thing to contemplate, being 13 and just beginning to dig into such a sumptuous feast. Enjoy!
I applaud RMS's call for a mass action to call Amason's attention to how strongly this community, at least, feels about their bullying tactics. But you don't want to threaten a boycott unless you're prepared to follow through on it. And right now, Amazon offers a level and a quality of service that no one else comes close to.
I think that a more appropriate response from the hacker community might be to look for a way to educate the courts that will be ruling on Amazon's claim regarding the non-innovative, non-unique nature of the "1-click technology", in the hopes that the courts will reverse the Patent Office's foolishness. That strategy worked pretty well last year to counter the stupidity embodied in the Telecommunications Decency Act, and it might work again to counter the stupidity of the Patent Office.
You've nailed the problem: any communications channel supported by advertising owes more to any individual advertiser than to any individual reader and more to its advertisers as a group than to its readers. Every choice made by the editors and publishers of an advertising-supported medium is suspect - the choice of what topics to cover, what writers to hire, how and how much to slant content. So it follows logically that a magazine supported by its readers would be more trustworthy than one supported by advertising. But we're a long way from figuring out how to do that. A lot of events - not only in the world of computers - are leading to the notion that we need a new model of funding journalism. Perhaps we could put some pressure on corporations and a few internet millionaires to endow journalistic media; a magazine with an endowment of a few million dollars could charge a modest amount for print copies and publish free online versions without having to accept advertising. Perhaps it could run an annual fund-raising drive, like public broadcasting stations do, to beef up its operating budget. A modestly endowed journal could pay reporters and editors well, and we could look to the internet, and especially open source software efforts, for models of how such an endowed enterprise might be effectively governed.
One of the neatest things about the Internet (or at least a small corner of it) is how Usenet heirarchies vote on proposed new groups. Anyone can vote; votes are counted by a vote-counting program, and the voting occurs over a period of time, typically a month. During that period, any individual voter (i.e. email address) can vote as often as s/he likes; at the end of the voting period, only the most recent vote counts. As we head into what promises to be the longest presidential campaign in history, that technique has some considerable appeal. Assuming that issues of fraud and equal access can be solved (big assumptions, granted), a voting period that covers the month of October and that's handled a la Usenet could present a couple of benefits. It could involve people more intensely in the process. If I've voted, but knew that I could reverse or alter my vote, then I think that I'd be more attentive to the issues and the behavior of the candidates than I am under the current system. The candidates, too, would have to watch their steps more closely. A candidate who is leading dramatically in the polls could still lose it if some dramatic act by his opponent or a gaffe by himself could trigger a large flurry of last-minute vote changes.
I think it's outrageous that amazon is using its army of lawyers plus a very dubious patent to force another vendor to limit the services that vendor offers me. I just cancelled the two orders I had pending at amazon, asked them to cancel my account, opened an account at bn.com and placed my orders there.
Tom Case, at Debco Computers in Cincinnati, has had them for a little under $2K. I recommended one to a friend who was going to be trekking through Nepal and Thailand for three months. They're cute, but the keyboard, imo, is too small for serious work. Amazingly good screen display, tho - a little screen, little pixels, but full 800x600 display, quite bright and readable.