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+-   Writing for Video Game Genres on Friday November 20, @11:07AM Aeonite

Submitted by Aeonite on Friday November 20, @11:07AM
books
Aeonite writes "The third book in a pseudo-trilogy, Writing for Video Game Genres: From FPS to RPG offers advice from 21 experts in the field of video game writing, pulled from the ranks of the IGDA's Game Writers Special Interest Group and wrangled together by editor Wendy Despain. It follows in the footsteps of Professional Techniques for Video Game Writing and Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames, and in keeping with the trend offers the most specific, targeted advice for how to write for an assortment of game genres.

Depending on your particular poison, the authors of each chapter might be immediately recognizable or complete unknowns. Possibly most likely to be familiar to a general audience are Sande Chen (The Witcher) and Richard Dansky (Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell, Far Cry), but Lee Sheldon (the Agatha Christie series), Andrew Walsh (Prince of Persia) and David Wessman (the Star Wars: X-Wing series) might also ring a bell.

The important thing here, however, is not who the writers are, so much as that they deftly cover a wide variety of terrain. As the subtitle suggests the book covers everything from FPS to RPG, from MMO to ARG, and the entirety of alphabet soup in-between. Each chapter covers the particular challenges of writing for one particular genre, and generally offers specific tips on how to overcome those challenges when writing for that genre. The chapter on MMOs, for example, discusses the fact that MMOs have stories that never end, worlds with millions of chosen ones, and a complete inability to control pacing or quest flow. "Writing for Platform Games" emphasizes the need to provide a coherent narrative even while the player is generally busy trying to complete the next jumping puzzle. Other familiar genres covered along the way include Adventure games, Sports games, Flight Simulators and Driving games.

Several of the chapters also venture outside of what traditionally constitutes a "game genre." For example, Richard Dansky and Chris Klug respectively cover Horror and Sci-Fi/Fantasy, themes that are based on the shape of the narrative rather than any particular gameplay format. Later chapters also explore Sandbox games (which author Ahmad Saad indicates can include everything from Grand Theft Auto III to SimCity), Serious games (being "games that do not have entertainment as a primary purpose"), and Casual games. Chapters are also devoted to specific platforms: Evan Skolnick covers Handheld games, and Graeme Davis explores Mobile Phone games. The fact that some of these categories necessarily include games that might also fall into genres covered earlier is never a problem here, however; each chapter offers specific advice relevant to its particular subject, and there is little if any "what he said" repetition to be found, and certainly nothing like outright contradictory advice from different authors.

While a single numbered outline format is followed throughout the book, each author writes in a slightly different fashion. This means that some authors (such as Andrew Walsh, in his coverage of Platformers) present swaths of dense copy within each numbered section, whereas others break up their chapter with numerous subheads, a single short paragraph beneath each point (as with Daniel Erickson's chapter on RPGs). Further, while the format of the book's bulleted lists is consistent throughout, their prevalence is somewhat uneven; Lee Sheldon's chapter on Adventure games is chock full of bullets, while Dansky's chapter on Horror games nearly dispenses with them altogether (but for one single list of five items). Certain chapters contain many charts, tables and/or screenshots, while others lack them altogether. One particular design feature — a boxed "Special Note" that intrudes into the margin — is used only a scant handful of times in the entire book, which makes each sudden instance more of a "Hey! Over Here!!" than the "Psst, by the way..." which I think was intended.

None of this is in any way bad: in fact, Despain's Preface encourages skipping around, and specifically addresses the issue of inconsistency by saying that the chapters are "written as personal essays with the individual style of each author intact." However, it is a notable feature of the book and worth a mention; this is not a book you read from cover to cover in one sitting.

The larger consideration for the purposes of review is this: should you buy a copy? The book's intended audience is — as with the earlier books in the "trilogy" — geared towards professionals already working in the game industry. Quotes on the back cover specifically mention "those of us swimming in the murky waters of games storytelling," and the book's closing chapter (J. Robinson Wheeler's "Writing For Interactive Fiction") dispenses with any illusion altogether, saying "If you're reading this book, you're a writer..." Even the Preface says "we" more than "you" when addressing the reader. The assumption is that you're already "one of us," and while that's a warm embrace for me (since I am indeed "one of them"), it might come across as a bit of a lukewarm shoulder for someone outside the industry.

In short, this book — perhaps even moreso than either of the previous IGDA Writers SIG books — is by writers, and for writers. As a "starting point from which we (game writers) can work together to improve the state of the art," the book provides an excellent foundation, and deserves to be on the bookshelf of any game writer or designer, be they novice or veteran. As for everyone else... if you're ready to dip a toe in the chilly waters of game writing, you could do far worse than to check out the advice within.

You can purchase Writing for Video Game Genres: From FPS to RPG from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews — to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page."
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+-   Google accused of violating copyright in China-> on Thursday November 19, @05:43PM angry tapir

Submitted by angry tapir on Thursday November 19, @05:43PM
google
angry tapir writes "The Chinese Authors Society has demanded that Google present a resolution plan by the end of the year and quickly handle compensation for Chinese authors whose books the U.S. company has scanned without permission as part of its Book Search program. A local copyright protection group, co-founded by the authors group, has said it found at least 17,000 Chinese works included in Google's scanning plan."
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+-   Public School Teachers Selling Lesson Plans Online on Sunday November 15, @04:38PM theodp

Submitted by theodp on Sunday November 15, @04:38PM
theodp writes "Thousands of teachers are using websites like Teachers Pay Teachers and We Are Teachers to cash in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises as simple as M&M sorting and as sophisticated as Shakespeare. While some of this extra money is going to buy books and classroom supplies, the new teacher-entrepreneurs are also spending it on dinners out, mortgage payments, credit card bills, vacation travel and even home renovation, raising questions over who owns material developed for public school classrooms."
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+-   Holocaust Denier's Email Hacked, Leaked-> on Sunday November 15, @11:45AM AdamD1

Submitted by AdamD1 on Sunday November 15, @11:45AM
security
AdamD1 writes "It appears that a group of hackers have had access to holocaust denier's email accounts for some time, and decided to post a lot of what they found on Wikileaks.

The hackers posted Irving's e-mail correspondence online, as well as the user name and password for his web site account and AOL e-mail account, which shared the same password. The hackers also posted the e-mail addresses and other personal information — such as names, phone numbers and shipping and credit card billing addresses — of people who made donations through his web sites, purchased his books or bought tickets for his appearances.

"
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Comments: 1 +-   Bernie Madoff's Programmers Arrested-> on Friday November 13, @10:38AM ZipK

Submitted by ZipK on Friday November 13, @10:38AM
ZipK writes "With their former boss cooling his heels on a 150-year sentence, programmers Jerome O'Hara and George Perez are now in the U.S. Attorney's crosshairs. They've been arrested and charged with "conspiracy, falsifying books and records of a broker-dealer and falsifying the books and records of an investment advisory." Apparently Madoff's fraud was too large and too complex to be foisted entirely by hand."
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Comments: 3 +-   Intel's New E-Reader for the Visually Impaired-> on Tuesday November 10, @02:33AM serverguy

Submitted by serverguy on Tuesday November 10, @02:33AM
intel
serverguy writes "A win for all visually impaired members of society with Intel releasing a new device called the Intel Reader. It allows visually impaired people to take a snap shot of a newspapers, books and magazines and have it read back to them. It's estimated that in the US alone there are as many as 55 million people who could make use of such a device. It comes at hefty price though, costing US$1,499 for the paperback sized device which contains a 5 megapixel camera and is powered by a Linux OCR system that converts text into spoken words. The device can contain up to 2GB of data which would equate around 600 snap shots, in addition to reading text to words the device can also play back a Audio Books in a number of supported files such as MP3s and WAV.

The device is expected to be released next Tuesday."
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+-   Lulu introduces DRM-> on Saturday November 07, @10:56PM Anonymous Coward

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 07, @10:56PM
An anonymous reader writes "Print-on-demand publisher Lulu recently announced that they're offering "eBooks". Since they've always offered downloadable books as PDFs, that takes some decoding to figure out what part is new: it turns out that it means now they're handling more formats, they've significantly increased the share they take out of the purchase price... and for an additional fee, they now offer DRM. I have a few items published through Lulu myself; nothing forces me to buy the DRM, but I'm considering taking my business elsewhere on principle. This isn't what I expected from the people who, when I first signed up with them, were solidly endorsing Creative Commons."
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+-   Comic Books Improve Early Childhood Literacy on Friday November 06, @06:28PM Hugh Pickens

Submitted by Hugh Pickens on Friday November 06, @06:28PM
education
Hugh Pickens writes "The Telegraph reports that Professor Carol Tilley, a professor of library and information science at the University of Illinois, says that comics are just as sophisticated as other forms of reading, children benefit from reading them at least as much as they do from reading other kinds of books, and that there is evidence that comics increase children's vocabulary and instill a love of reading. "A lot of the criticism of comics and comic books come from people who think that kids are just looking at the pictures and not putting them together with the words," says Tilley. "But you could easily make some of the same criticisms of picture books – that kids are just looking at pictures, and not at the words." Tilley says that some of the condescension toward comics as a medium may come from the connotations that the name itself evokes but that the distinct comic book aesthetic — frames, thought and speech bubbles, motion lines, to name a few — has been co-opted by children's books, creating a hybrid format. "There has been an increase in the number of comic book-type elements in books for younger children," Tilley says. "If you really consider how the pictures and words work together in consonance to tell a story, you can make the case that comics are just as complex as any other kind of literature.""
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+-   Cacti 0.8 Network Monitoring on Tuesday November 03, @02:40PM GJdeBoer

Submitted by GJdeBoer on Tuesday November 03, @02:40PM
books
GJdeBoer writes "The book is aimed at people managing a network and would like to get insight into the performance of that network. It covers the installation and configuration of the Cacti application. In the preface the book states that it's not necessary to be a Linux Guru to use the book and that exactly is the case. The book builds up your knowledge about Cacti and the necessary steps to configure it for your network, it teaches you about Net-SNMP and RRDTool, the building blocks of Cacti.

As I've been working with Cacti for several years now, my aim was to get a book that describes the best practices for Cacti installations and to get a reference guide for myself. My hope was to get some more knowledge about the inner workings of Cacti and I think although meant for Cacti beginners, the book did a good job at that. I got a more clear idea about the architecture of Cacti which helps me with the integration of Cacti in my client’s networks.

The book starts off with an introduction to Cacti. It explains what Cacti is, how the global architecture is and for what purposes it can be used. It also explains the basics of the prerequisite RRDTool. In the next chapter the book explains the installation of the prerequisites. The book then progresses on the installation, configuration and tasks like authentication and authorization of users. We then learn to add devices and assign templates to them.

The last chapters end the book with advanced topics for Cacti users such as Data Management and Cacti Management. It explains how to create your own data and snmp queries to be able to monitor custom devices. Personally, I found these chapters to be the most educational part of the book.

As for this book no advanced knowledge of Linux is needed. It explains the installation steps of Cacti and its prerequisites clearly and with a lot of exemplary screenshots. As Cacti is managed by means of an web interface it is the most clear way to make a point in a book about Cacti. The book is easy to read and I think the book covers the theory needed to install and operate a Cacti server perfectly. As it explains the use of Templates in Cacti and why you should use them, the book helps people build scalable and neat Cacti setups.

As a downside of the book I have found the clear focus being on the Debian side of Linux distributions. All the installation done in the book is by using apt-get, Debian and Ubuntu's package management system, but in the professional Linux world you are seeing more RedHat based distributions then Debian. I would have liked a couple of tooltips on how to install the prerequisites on RedHat or CentOS with the yum package manager or maybe by using source packages for installation. It's not a big downside for more advanced users but for the Linux novices, at who the book targets on, it could be a bit hard to find out the right way to install Cacti on a RedHat or CentOS box. Since the configuration of Cacti is the same on every platform this is only applicable for the installation chapters.

In general the book does exactly what the cover says: “Monitor your network with ease” although I found it a bit short. The book consists of a hundred and ten pages, but since there are a lot of screenshots on the pages there is less text. The book doesn't dive very deep into the inner workings of Cacti. One could argue that is exactly the point of the book: most people don't use that kind of knowledge. I would have liked a bit more insight into the MySQL database behind Cacti and troubleshooting steps for when your graphs stop working.

I think the book is great for people who want to start with Cacti because they want to monitor their network. They can install and operate a Cacti instance very quickly with help of this book without having previous knowledge of Linux. In my field of work I often come in contact with customers who have problems in their network. I always advice them to install a network monitoring appliance like Cacti. Since most of them use Windows networks they often have no experience in configuring a Linux server for Cacti. I think I will recommend this book in the future to these people.

Gert-Jan de Boer
Self-employed IT Consultant with a company that specializes in Networking, Voice over IP, Storage and Virtualisation. http://www.aazoo.nl/"
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+-   Negroponte Hints at Paper-Like Design for XO-3-> on Monday November 02, @10:59PM waderoush

Submitted by waderoush on Monday November 02, @10:59PM
education
waderoush writes "In May 2008, Nicholas Negroponte, chairman of the One Laptop Per Child Foundation, unveiled e-book like design for the second-generation XO Laptop, consisting of a pair of facing touchscreens. In a new e-mail interview, Negroponte says that design has been thrown out, and that instead the foundation is working on version '1.75' of the existing green-and-white laptop with a more powerful processor, as well as a '3.0' version that would look 'more like a sheet of paper.' Negroponte also addressed a range of other questions about the OLPC project, including the significance of the project to make 1.6 million e-books readable on the XO laptop and the organization's push to reach more children in Latin America, Africa, Afghanistan, and Pakistan."
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+-   Books overtake Games on iPhone-> on Sunday November 01, @11:20PM ruphus13

Submitted by ruphus13 on Sunday November 01, @11:20PM
apple
ruphus13 writes "In a sign that ebooks are rising in popularity, a recent survey by mobile analytics company Flurry revealed that users may be using the iPhone for more 'intellectual' pursuits, and not just the visual sizzle. The 'book-related' apps on the iPhone overtook games in terms of new apps released, and one out of every five apps released were eBooks. According to the post, "Book-related apps saw an upsurge in launches in September, according to a survey conducted by Flurry, a San Francisco-based mobile application analytics company. So much so, that book-related applications overtook games in the App Store as a percentage of all released apps. The trend isn’t an aberration. In October, one out of every five new applications launching on the iPhone was a book...Because from August 2008 to the same month in 2009, more apps were released in the “games” category than any other and, as a result, the iPhone (and iPod touch) became a new handheld gaming platform, one that impacted Nintendo DS. The Japanese game device maker acknowledged that the iPhone and iPod touch were among the reasons why its profits declined drastically in the most recent quarter...The sharp rise in e-book activity on the iPhone indicates that Apple is positioned to take market share from the Amazon Kindle as it did from the Nintendo DS.""
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+-   Asimov estate authorises new I, Robot books-> on Friday October 30, @06:06AM daria42

Submitted by daria42 on Friday October 30, @06:06AM
money
daria42 writes "In a move guaranteed to annoy long-term science fiction fans, The estate of legendary science fiction author Isaac Asimov, who passed away in 1992, has authorised a trilogy of sequels to his beloved I, Robot short story series, to be written by relatively unknown fantasy author Mickey Zucker Reichert. The move is already garnering opposition online. "Isaac Asimoc died forty years after they were first written. If he had wanted to follow them up, he would have. The author’s intentions need to be respected here," writes sci-fi/fantasy book site Keeping the Door."
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+-   New improvements on the attacks on WPA/TKIP on Thursday October 29, @01:34PM olahau

Submitted by olahau on Thursday October 29, @01:34PM
security
olahau writes "Two weeks ago, improvements to the previously reported attack on WPA/TKIP, were presented at the NorSec Conference in Oslo, Norway. In their paper coined "An Improved Attack on TKIP", Finn Michael Halvorsen and Olav Haugen describes the improvements, which enables an attacker to inject larger maliciously crafted packets into a WPA/TKIP protected network, thus opening the probabilities for new and more sophisticated attacks against the well established wireless security protocol."
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+-   Service Oriented Architecture with Java on Wednesday October 28, @01:44PM Martijn de Boer

Submitted by Martijn de Boer on Wednesday October 28, @01:44PM
books
Martijn de Boer writes "The book has been written to provide the reader with a short introduction to the concepts of Service Oriented Architecture with Java. The book covers the theory and analysis from the start and is progressing to a more intermediate level slowly throughout the different chapters. This book has been written for software architects and programmers of the Java language who have an interest in building software using SOA concepts in their applications. The cover hints to a series called “From Technologies to Solutions”, and that is exactly what this book tries to do, it tries to explain the SOA technology with different case studies and a path for solutions for your applications.

When I ordered the copy of the book, I was under the impression that I was required some familiarity with terms used in the world of SOA but I was rather fond of the easy explanation of terms in the first chapter. The first chapter starts off with a small introduction to the role of software architecture when thinking about a software project. The chapter covers alternatives to SOA and tries to get the reader onto the right path for the rest of the book.

Later on in the book different subjects pass, the first few chapters start off with the basics of using XML as a communication layer. The third chapter introduces the audience to different implementations of web services in the Java world including the most familiar names as Apache Axis, Spring and XFire. The reader will be shown and guided to the install process of these web services and is being shown around the process of working with the software. The pros and cons of every piece of software are shown when following the steps throughout the chapters.

The book ends with chapters providing case studies of real world examples of SOA and alternatives. I have found this to be the most informative section of the book when looking to make decisions on how to architect a software project as it provides several examples on when to use which aspect of SOA. The different case studies allow you to put some weight and foundations into your decisions. The last chapter of the book is basically a conclusion of what we have learned throughout the book and provides a clear summary of goals of using service oriented architecture.

The reader is expected to have understanding of Java to follow the examples throughout the book. Examples are demonstrated on Windows machines, but could be followed on any other platform as well without having the hassle of setting up a different environment. That is one of the advantages of Service Oriented Architecture with Java, because it basically can be ran everywhere.
When you work your way throughout the book, you will discover different clearly illustrated diagrams and other informational graphics. There are more than enough images to make the image not a boring theory book, as the images often provide a better understanding of different explanations of architecture and setups throughout the book.

The book covers a small setup with Apache Axis 1.3 and mentions to use this opposed to the more recent 2.0 version because more software is being implemented on top of the 1.x series of said web service. However because the reader is starting to learn about SOA, it would have been great to see some of the differences and read why 2.0 hasn't been adopted much yet. I would have liked to see a bigger comparison between those two versions, but as the authors point out, there is a great community for both versions which provides a lot more background information if you want to look further into the more technical information that isn't provided in the book yet.
This book is a good way to get your feet wet in using web services to build and architect powerful Java applications for your business. I am no big Java developer yet, and I needed this book to navigate me through the different pieces of software available, it succeeded very well at that point. I was fond of the clear writing style, which has always been the case by books from Packt Publishing. The book also has been written in a logical order, putting case studies at the end of the book so they are better to follow. Most technical books I own are written in a way that allows you to jump from chapter to chapter in an order that you need them, but I found this book to be a solid line of information of which the difficulty grade builds up from beginning to end. As a developer and software architect I am really appreciating how well this book has been written for this audience, it's almost as if it was written especially for me and the knowledge I had of service oriented architecture before starting with this book.

http://www.packtpub.com/service-oriented-architecture-for-java-applications/book
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/Service-Oriented-Architecture-With-Java/Malhar-Barai/e/9781847193216/?itm=2&USRI=Java%2CService+Oriented+Architecture"
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+-   Amazon Patents Changing Authors' Words on Tuesday October 27, @11:04PM theodp

Submitted by theodp on Tuesday October 27, @11:04PM
books
theodp writes "To exist or not to exist: that is the query. That's what the famous Hamlet soliloquy might look like if subjected to Amazon's newly-patented System and Method for Marking Content, which calls for 'programmatically substituting synonyms into distributed text content,' including 'books, short stories, product reviews, book or movie reviews, news articles, editorial articles, technical papers, scholastic papers, and so on' in an effort to uniquely identify customers who redistribute material. In its description of the 'invention,' Amazon also touts the use of 'alternative misspellings for selected words' as a way to provide 'evidence of copyright infringement in a legal action.' After all, anti-piracy measures should trump kids' ability to spell correctly, shouldn't they?"
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Comments: 1 +-   Tesla breaks land record for electric car-> on Tuesday October 27, @08:35PM Anonymous Coward

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27, @08:35PM
An anonymous reader writes "The CEO of an Australian ISP has driven his Tesla Roadster into the record books, completing 501km on a single electric charge in the 2009 Global Green Challenge — beating the Tesla's official specifications, which rate the all-electric sports car capable of a maximum 390km per charge. The previous record was held by another Roadster in the 387km Rallye Monte Carlo d'Energies Alternatives in April this year. In a race specifically designed for alternative energy vehicles (such as hydrogen and electricty), the Roadster triumphed to win honours as the only vehicle to complete the entire course. Though to be fair, that race course was a mixture of twists, turns and hills."
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+-   Sci-Fi Reading for an E-Commerce College Course? on Tuesday October 27, @12:54PM Anonymous Coward

Submitted by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 27, @12:54PM
An anonymous reader writes "My friend will be teaching an e-commerce class at a four-year college starting in the spring. He wants to present not just existing business models (Amazon, eBay, iTunes), but also help students to think about the future — what might be hot in ten, twenty, thirty years. To that end, he's looking to draw from science fiction literature — today's fiction could be the inspiration for tomorrow's billion-dollar idea. Any suggestions for books that he should assign? What sci-fi works have the most intriguing (put plausible) technology and consumer products? The more variety, the better; some kind of anthology would be ideal."
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+-   Book Review: OpenGL Shading Language (3rd Edition) on Monday October 26, @10:24PM Martin Ecker

Submitted by Martin Ecker on Monday October 26, @10:24PM
graphics
Martin Ecker writes "Statistics
Title: OpenGL Shading Language (Third Edition)
Author: Randi J. Rost, Bill Licea-Kane
Pages: 743
Rating: 9/10
Publisher: Addison-Wesley Professional http://www.informit.com/opengl
ISBN-10: 0-321-63763-1
ISBN-13: 978-0-321-63763-5
Price: $59.99 US
Book Website: http://www.3dshaders.com/
Summary: A solid introduction to developing shaders in the OpenGL Shading Language GLSL.

The “OpenGL Shading Language” (also called the Orange Book because of its orange cover) is back in its meanwhile third edition with updated discussions of the OpenGL shading language up to version 1.40 introduced with OpenGL 3.1. Like the previous edition, the third edition of the book is one of the best introductions to GLSL — the OpenGL Shading Language — that not only teaches the ins and outs of GLSL itself but also explains in-depth how to develop shaders in GLSL for lighting, shadows, animation, and other topics relevant to real-time computer graphics.

Not unexpectedly the book starts out with a brief review of OpenGL basics. However, I would not recommend diving into this book without having prior experience with OpenGL, or at least with some other kind of 3D API, such as Direct3D. The book targets an audience that is already familiar with computer graphics and with OpenGL. Furthermore, knowledge of the C programming language is expected.

The next few chapters introduce the syntax and semantics of GLSL. At its core, GLSL is very similar to C. All the usual control flow statements, such as if statements and for loops, are available. However, the language adds some graphics-specific types, such as vectors and matrices. Even though this material is fairly dry, the writing is easy to follow and all concepts are presented with plenty of examples. Also uniform blocks — a new feature of GLSL version 1.40 — are discussed. Uniform blocks are used to efficiently send a block of variables via a uniform buffer to the GPU.

After familiarizing the reader with the language itself, chapter four delves into the integration of the shader-programmable units into the OpenGL pipeline, in particular the vertex and fragment shader units. Note that geometry shaders are not discussed in this book since they are a fairly recent addition to the OpenGL 3.2 specification.
The next chapter goes over all the built-in, common functions that GLSL provides, such as sin, cos, abs, fract, and so on. Being more of a visual learner, what I really like about this chapter that the authors provide function graphs for each of the functions introduced.
After all the basics of the shading language have been laid out in previous chapters, chapter six is dedicated to a full-fledged example that uses GLSL to procedurally render a brick pattern. If you're already familiar with other shading languages, such as Direct3D's HLSL or Cg, and you want to switch over to OpenGL/GLSL, I recommend jumping straight to this chapter to see how much you can grasp and then going back to the preceding pages to fill in the blanks if necessary.

The somewhat lengthy chapter seven contains detailed descriptions of the entry points provided by OpenGL to create and set up shader programs. Among other things, it describes how shader objects are created, compiled, and then linked to form shader programs that can then be used to render objects. Chapter seven concludes the dry, technical part of the book that introduced both the shading language and the necessary infrastructure to use it from a host program running on the CPU. The remainder of the book concentrates on numerous graphics techniques that can be achieved with shaders, such as bump mapping, lighting, shadows, animation, procedural effects, and many more. In short, it's the real fun part of the book where all the theory gets put into practice.

One of the highlights for me is the chapter on writing lighting shaders that discusses hemi-sphere lighting, image-based lighting using environment maps as light probes, and spherical harmonics lighting. The chapter on lighting is concluded by a discussion of the ÜberLight shader, a shader for a very versatile lighting model initially presented as RenderMan shader by Pixar Animation Studios.
Where there's no light there's shadow and so the book has an interesting chapter on various shadowing techniques, in particular ambient occlusion, shadow maps, and an interesting technique for rendering shadow volumes using deferred shading. The latter technique can be used to render soft shadows convincingly.

The most interesting chapter for me in the book is the one on surface characteristics. It discusses and develops shaders to render surface materials that exhibit complex light interaction. The authors start out with a discussion of refraction and present shaders to achieve the classic Fresnel reflection/refraction and chromatic aberration effects. Then diffraction, i.e. light bending around sharp edges, is discussed and a shader that renders a vinyl record realistically is developed. Finally, the chapter focuses on BRDF-based lighting and develops various material shaders using the BRDF model, a quite important topic nowadays since more and more video games now actually use BRDF-based lighting models.

Another important chapter in the book in my opinion is chapter seventeen about antialiased procedural textures. I consider it important because it is often ignored that shaders that procedurally create textures usually suffer from aliasing artifacts. This chapter shows a number of anti-aliasing techniques to diminish these issues. Chapter eighteen is a fun chapter on non-photorealistic rendering, discussing hatching, Gooch shading, and how to render the Mandelbrot set in a shader. Finally, the book closes with a comparison of GLSL with other shading languages, in particular RenderMan, HLSL, and Cg. This is mostly of interest to real geeks and language lawyers ;)

As in the previous edition, all images and diagrams in the book are in black and white, except for a few pages that contain 34 color plates in the middle of the book. Most of the images are not overly "flashy" but do give a practical idea of the types of rendered images a particular shader can produce.

The book’s accompanying website at http://www.3dshaders.com/ offers the source code to all the shaders presented in the book for download. Also available are other shaders not mentioned in the book and a demo application including source code, which nicely demonstrates the shaders in action. Most of the shaders are available under a very liberal BSD-style open source license.

The third edition of "OpenGL Shading Language" is an excellent introduction to shader programming with GLSL. It provides an in-depth and comprehensive discussion of the shading language itself as well as the C shader API used to create and manage shaders in the host program. The best and largest part of the book focuses on developing shaders for various applications, such as lighting, shadows, animation, and other areas of real-time computer graphics. If you’re interested in learning GLSL and shader programming in OpenGL, this is the book to get.

About the review author:
The author has been involved in real-time graphics programming for more than 10 years and works as a professional game developer for High Moon Studios http://www.highmoonstudios.com/ in sunny California."
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+-   Book review: Drupal 6 Social Networking-> on Saturday October 24, @08:30PM dag

Submitted by dag on Saturday October 24, @08:30PM
books
dag writes "An interesting book about how to build social networks and why Drupal is a good choice as a platform for building communities. Even when you don't have any Drupal experience yet, this book explains what is needed when you start from scratch and looks at the different facets of a social network.

title: Drupal 6 Social Networking
author: Michael Peacock
pages: 290
publisher: Packt Publishing
reviewer: Dag Wieers
ISBN: 978-1-847196-10-1
summary: Building community websites using Drupal as a content management framework

The book starts off with a short introduction about social networks and a list of compelling reasons why one wants to set up her own social network rather than using an existing social network like Facebook or MySpace. It all comes down to what your particular goals are. The first chapter looks into why Drupal is a good fit for building a community website. Its modular design, use of known technologies and ease of installation, as well as the ample availability of modules help in that respect, and also clearly marks where the book is going next. The other half of the first chapter explains in great detail what is needed during the installation of Drupal to have a working setup. If you are already experienced with setting up Drupal you can skim through this chapter to verify that you did not miss anything with earlier installations.

The second chapter prepares the reader for using Drupal specifically targeted for building a community website. To do this the author comes up with his own example (Dino Space) which is used throughout the book. And while the subject may be far-fetched and very different from what you plan to do, it serves its purpose well. Throughout this chapter the author explains many Drupal related concepts and terminology like Nodes, Content Types or Blocks and how to use these to your advantage when designing your site.

So while the first and second chapters explains and prepares the reader, chapter three helps with important decisions regarding user contributed content and all aspects related to it. User Roles, Comments, Polls, Forums and Blogs. One thing that surprised me was how it is possible to write blog entries from Microsoft Word using a standardized API. And while it is not applicable to me (as a Linux user) I can see some benefit for others within the targeted community. Another topic from the book that I had little experience with is collaborating on a Book within your community. I was always amazed by the annotated PHP manual in the past and this possibility reflects that effort a great deal. The chapter also includes attention to how to automatically generate feeds or include feeds from others, something that helps growing the community.

The next chapter goes into how users can maintain their profiles, how profiles can be extended and themed and how profiles can be shared between websites. It also looks into specific modules to help you eg. integrate OpenID or avatars from other websites. Chapter five explains how users can interact and how the User Relationships and User Activity modules allow users to promote their own content and actions on their site. Much like how Facebook becomes a time log of individual actions of our friends. It also looks at Guestbooks, Contact forms and Groups covering more than I was looking for myself.

One thing I recently had to look into myself was how to communicate with your users. Some users register and then loose touch so there is a clear need to regularly update them about what is happening and what new content is available and that's where chapter six explains how to set up Newsletters or connect your social network to online services like Google Groups.

Drupal is mostly respected for its modular design and Drupal's author often states "If it cannot be done from a module, then that's a design bug which needs to be fixed". That said, almost everything is possible from a module, which offers great flexibility to anyone deploying Drupal to customize it to its own needs. Chapter seven explains in some detail how to write your own Drupal modules from accessing the database, interacting with other services as well as making it installable and customizable. The example shows how to interact with Google Maps from a Drupal module. But also points to similar modules for connecting to Facebook.

Another important aspect of any website is its design, chapter eight shows how to install and configure additional themes, but also explains how to modify existing templates and tweak CSS files. It does not go into great detail though, but it sufficiently points out where to look and how to experiment.

The last two chapters are a bit dim, chapter nine explains how to secure your Drupal site from automated spam and lists a few maintenance tasks every admin should know about. Much like chapter nine, chapter ten does not go into a lot of detail about how to promote your website. It mostly lists important aspects and in some cases provides links to experienced websites.

All in all I was surprised by the many items this book covers, especially the chapters about writing modules and modifying themes is something most buyers will not expect in a Drupal book regarding Social Networking. And while I believe there are better books about those topics, in general this book is a good introduction to Drupal and a guide for those who are also interested in the more advanced parts of Drupal.

I was particularly interested in this book as I set up my own family website based on Drupal and I wanted to know what technologies I missed, and what additional modules I could use to make our own family website better. In that regard this book confirmed for a large part that what I did with Drupal was how it was supposed to be, but in addition even I did learn some new tricks and new modules I never investigated before. This knowledge undoubtedly will be useful for some future Drupal-based projects as well."
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Comments: 1 +-   Internet Archive Puts 1.6M E-Books on OLPC Laptops-> on Saturday October 24, @02:16PM waderoush

Submitted by waderoush on Saturday October 24, @02:16PM
books
waderoush writes "Brewster Kahle of the San Francisco-based Internet Archive announced today that all 1.6 million books scanned and digitized by the Archive will be available for reading on XO laptops built by the Cambridge, MA-based One Laptop Per Child Foundation. The announcement came during a session on electronic books and electronic publishing at the Boston Book Festival. Kahle said the Archive has been collaborating with OLPC for a year to format the e-books for display on the XO laptops, some 750,000 of which are in use by children in developing countries."
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