Cafe Tortoni

Book Description

This digital document is an article from Variaciones Borges, published by University of Aarhus, Borges Center on January 1, 2005. The length of the article is 9837 words. The page length shown above is based on a typical 300-word page. The article is delivered in HTML format and is available in your Amazon.com Digital Locker immediately after purchase. You can view it with any web browser.

Citation Details
Title: De la casa (tomada) al cafe (Tortoni): historia de los dos que se entendieron: Borges y Cortazar.
Author: Daniel Mesa Gancedo
Publication: Variaciones Borges (Refereed)
Date: January 1, 2005
Publisher: University of Aarhus, Borges Center
Volume: 19 Page: 125(24)

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Book Description

Who hasn’t overheard a twit on a cell phone, talking loudly about one inanity or another? Or just missed getting sideswiped by someone gabbing on a phone while driving? Or found someone chatting away in the restroom at work? We’ve all complained enough about the jerks whose cell phones ring during a movie, at concerts, and even in church. Now it’s time to take action—and communications and etiquette expert Barbara Pachter offers just what we all need: A Survival Guide for the Rest of Us. Pachter offers the smartest—and funniest—ways to deal with all the jerks out there without becoming one yourself. Included are the world’s most unbelievable but true cell phone horror stories, hilarious revenge stories, ways to jerk-proof your own cell phone use, and cartoons highlighting just how brainless we’ve all become about the technology we love to hate. This very funny and very useful guide will help to channel the rage we all feel toward the jerk on the cell phone—and show the rest of us how to stop the madness and reclaim some peace and quiet.

Customer Reviews:

Humorous , but also enlightening!.......2007-01-05

As one of, it seems, the few people about me without a cell phone I really enjoyed this book. Written more as a 'commentary', and by a user and devotee of cellphones! The common irritant of so many people yelling into their phone is explained: they can't find their own volume control, and assume because they can't hear, they can't be heard! Very, very valid comments all through; I imagine too true for some!

A Must Read For All Cell Users.......2004-11-16

I'm a big Roz Chast (New Yorker) fan so the cover was a big selling point for me. I was going to give this book to my girlfriend for Xmas, she's the worst...we'll be having dinner and she'll talk on her phone to other people! I ended up reading it and I really enjoyed it. I'm not sure if I would have the guts to give a stranger one of the cards, but I'm going to use them on my friend next chance I get. The stories are hilarious--there's even one in a coffin.

Brilliant advice in handling a touchy situation........2004-10-05

Not just a string of jokes about how rude people can be on their cell phones. Yes, there are plenty of real-life stories that we can all relate to, but this book also humorously takes an issue that is increasingly common and gives The Rest of Us a plan of action. (By the way. You don't have to hate cell phones to love this book. In fact, I consider the cell phone a necessity of life.)
Three things can happen when you read this book:
1.You use the tips to politely stop the cell phone jerks in their tracks. (80 percent of the time.)
2.You use the tips and it does absolutely no good. (20 percent of the time.)
3.You find out you're a cell phone jerk and you stop acting that way.
That last one will get you. Everyone at some point has exhibited less than polite behavior while using the cell phone. If you can stop yourself, that's half the battle!

Book Description

For more than 25 years, Iron Maiden has led the way in heavy metal -selling over 50 million records, setting trends, and influencing everyone from Metallica to Marilyn Manson. In this popular biography, now in its third edition, the authors interview individual band members and get their stories of how it all began, describe Maiden's rise to the top, and provide a general picture of the music industry.

Customer Reviews:

Maiden 4-Ever.......2007-04-15

This is a really great book. Not only as it is the biography of one of the greatest heavy metal bands: Iron Maiden written by excellent writer Mick Wall (of Kerrang / Classic Rock fame). The book perfectly describes the bands unique determination to keep playing and growing continuously as band members are exchanged and overall music trends are changing.

The band's story is very inspirational and instills the mantra to never give up and keep fighting for what you thing is right will give results. Well recommended to all fans of music.

Excellent in-depth book of the history of Iron Maiden.......2006-11-16

What I like about this book is that it tells the story behind the band and their music, rather than being a groupie/drugs tales book (like Hammer of the Gods on Zeppelin, for example). I've been reading magazine articles, books, etc. on the band for about a decade and a half, and I learned a lot from this book, but little from anything I've read since! It gives a large amount of detail on band member backgrounds and the rise of the band - I think you're about a third of the way through the book before he reaches the first album.
There are 2 reasons I don't give it 5 stars. First of all, the book breezes through what I (and many others) consider the peak of the band, the four albums from Piece of Mind to Seventh Son, and the author under-rates these albums. I've never met a fan who considers anything Maiden have done since the 80's as being as good as these albums, but the author considers the X Factor a masterpiece and Powerslave as full of filler! This is nonsense. Also, I think the book would be the better if it followed Bruce and Blaze's solo work a little - I think Bruce's albums in the 90's (specifically the 2 with Adrian Smith) are as much Maiden as anything the band put out, and both singers put out excellent work after leaving Maiden that are probably mostly listened to by Maiden fans.
I have the first edition of this book (from 1998, I believe), but it has been updated with each new album by the band. I'll probably pick up the next edition, if they update it for the new CD.

what's up with the bad reviews?.......2005-07-08

Mick Wall doesn't try to influence the reader with suggestions that any particular period of the group was better than another. Nor does his own personal opinions of which album was their best appear at all. This is just a well-balanced overview of one of the most important bands in rock music. For those interested in a sex and drugs book, this isn't for you. A great read, I couldn't put it down.

Great read!.......2005-02-17

Disregard those negative responses. This book is amazing and very knowledgable. Any metal fan would enjoy it, and even super Maiden freaks will learn quite a bit from it too.

It's an amazing biography from one of the greatest/most influential heavy metal bands. Everyone should read it!

Iron Maiden.......2005-01-04

This is a great book for information on iron maiden.It has anything a true fan would like to know about a great heavy metal band.

Book Description

As recently as the early 1990s, people wondered what was the future of cultural studies in the United States and what effects its increasing internationalization might have. What type of projects would cultural studies inspire people to undertake? Would established disciplines welcome its presence and adapt their practices accordingly? Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies answers such questions.

It is now clear that, while striking and innovative work is underway in many different fields, most disciplinary organizations and structures have been very resistant to cultural studies. Meanwhile, cultural studies has been subjected to repeated attacks by conservative journalists and commentators in the public sphere. Cultural studies scholars have responded not only by mounting focused critiques of the politics of knowledge but also by embracing ambitious projects of social, political, and cultural commentary, by transgressing all the official boundaries of knowledge in a broad quest for cultural understanding. This book tracks these debates and maps future strategies for cultural studies in academia and public life.

The contributors to Disciplinarity and Dissent in Cultural Studies include established scholars and new voices. In a series of polemic and exploratory essays written especially for this book, they track the struggle with cultural studies in disciplines like anthropology, literature and history; and between cultural studies and very different domains like Native American culture and the culture of science.

Contributors include Arjun Appadurai, Michael Denning, Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Constance Penley, Andrew Ross, and Lynn Spigel.

Customer Reviews:

Was Get Smart the best show? You bet your sweet shoephone!.......1999-10-02

This is the best of the Get Smart information books. In depth and great, Mrs. McCrohan gives a backstage peek at one of the best, funniest, and much overlooked parody comedies ever!

Average customer rating:

The Life and Times of Maxwell Smart
Donna McCrohan
Manufacturer: St Martins Pr
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000OTCMWQ

Book Description

Computers are just as busy as the rest of us nowadays. They have lots of tasks to do at once, and need some cleverness to get them all done at the same time. That's why threads are seen more and more often as a new model for programming. Threads have been available for some time. The Mach operating system, the Distributed Computer Environment (DCE), and Windows NT all feature threads. One advantage of most UNIX implementations, as well as DCE, is that they conform to a recently ratified POSIX standard (originally 1003.4a, now 1003.1c), which allows your programs to be portable between them. POSIX threads are commonly known as pthreads, after the word that starts all the names of the function calls. The standard is supported by Solaris, OSF/1, AIX, and several other UNIX-based operating systems. The idea behind threads programming is to have multiple tasks running concurrently within the same program. They can share a single CPU as processes do, or take advantage of multiple CPUs when available. In either case, they provide a clean way to divide the tasks of a program while sharing data. A window interface can read input on dozens of different buttons, each responsible for a separate task. A network server has to accept simultaneous calls from many clients, providing each with reasonable response time. A multiprocessor runs a number-crunching program on several CPUs at once, combining the results when all are done. All these kinds of applications can benefit from threads. In this book you will learn not only what the pthread calls are, but when it is a good idea to use threads and how to make them efficient (which is the whole reason for using threads in the first place). The authors delves into performance issues, comparing threads to processes, contrasting kernel threads to user threads, and showing how to measure speed. He also describes in a simple, clear manner what all the advanced features are for, and how threads interact with the rest of the UNIX system. Topics include:

Basic design techniques
Mutexes, conditions, and specialized synchronization techniques
Scheduling, priorities, and other real-time issues
Cancellation
UNIX libraries and re-entrant routines
Signals
Debugging tips
Measuring performance
Special considerations for the Distributed Computing Environment (DCE)

Customer Reviews:

Good for learning the basics but incomplete for modern multithreading programming.......2007-08-16

This book does a nice job for describing the pthread API. When I have read this book, my multithread programming experience was mainly with Win32 threads and reading this book was my first exposure to the condition synchronization objects. With the help of this book, it has been a breeze to learn how to use conditions. What is missing from this book written 10 years ago, which is also missing in all multithread books that I have read of that era, is coverage on issues with parallel processing. If all you have to do with threads is to launch a background job while keeping UI responsive or asynchronous I/O on a single core processor, you will be fine with this book.

However, if you try to crunch an array of data with multiple threads each processing their own chunk of the array, you could fall into cache line alignment problems even if your threads does not access the same memory locations. Those problems are platform dependant. I have written such a program that was working wonderfully well with a Sparc station and a PowerPC based station but once ported to a x86 architecture, the program was actually becoming slower than the single thread version. It is very hard to get it right. You have to be careful about the array alignment in memory and where the boundaries of the chunks of data that you assign to threads are. What will happen if 2 threads located on 2 different processors access to the same cache line is that one processor will have to flush that cache line back to the main memory and the other processor will have to fetch the values back from the main memory to its cache. The overhead of this is so huge that processing the array from a single thread could be faster.

I still have to find a book that addresses these problems. I expect it to come soon with dual and quad core processors becoming mainstream but this is not this book.

Excellent book overall, with some minor errors.......2006-06-24

This is the best Pthreads book. The writing style is conversational, very easy to read and interlaced with code examples. The reader will progressively learn the subject, building on the accumulated knowledge. Coverage of multi-theading concepts is very complete. There are some excellent diagrams.

Despite the publication date, this book is still very much relevant, because the Pthreads standard has not undergone any substantive change since then.

There are the usual O'Reilly book problems: a few typos and some errors in the example source code. The source code errors will cause problems for inexperienced programmers (they may think they, not the bad code, are the cause of the problems). There are a few places where a more complete explanation would have been nice. Despite these problems, overall the book is excellent. Don't take my word for it, compare it to other Pthreads books and you'll immediately see the difference.

Enjoy!

Adrien Lamothe

Excelent book to get you started with Pthreads.......2005-04-21

The book along with the code examples provided in O'reilly's web site provide an excelent starting point to the Pthreads programmer.

It's not a reference book, and don't ask me why I rated it 5 stars,

It also presents Pthreads and multithreading in a passionate way as if to convince the reader that multithreading is the way to go.

And it is!

o'reilly should be embarrased!!.......2002-09-28

I read the book a number of years ago to learn pthreads.
I found numerous errors in the examples -- speaking
at work to a colleague I recall we laughed at this book --
It was such a disaster.

I may read the book again (over the last few years I learned a lot about
pthreads) and give a careful analysis of it.

I had a first printing -- there were gobs of errata on
Oreilly's site -- maybe they put in enough corrections so
the examples run -- but I'm amazed how shoddy the first printing was.

Stay away from it...

Pretty Good.......2001-09-15

I found it too be an excellent overview. Its treatment of the issues associated with threads and signals I think was especially useful. My only complaint is with the Quick Reference in Appendix C. The reference provides no description of possible function call errors. While I admit the errors are dependant on the particular Pthreads implementation, however there are a core number of errors that would be common throughout all, or at least most, implementations. The point is if you are to do any actual programming, which I presume is the reason for a reference of function calls, you need to know what return values to expect. Providing no reference would have been better then providing a useless one.

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