How to Insure Your Income: A Step by Step Guide to Buying the Coverage You Need at Prices You Can Afford (How to Insure...Series)

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Provides important facts about disability insurance, the least known yet most often needed coverage.

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A New Approach compares and contrasts the various instruments and approaches used by the World Bank, IMF, European Commission and other development agencies to assess and reform public financial management systems in developing and transitional countries. It recommends an approach to assessment and reform that is country-led, has multi-donor support and is based on a coherent and integrated medium-term strategy for public financial management work, linked to a country's poverty reduction strategy and other key policy goals. This report makes concrete and practical recommendations to streamline the coverage of instruments and enhance collaboration between, donors, governments and other stakeholders. In doing so, it provides a firm basis for achieving more efficient and effective use of aid flows and national budgetary resources, to reduce poverty and realize other key policy goals and development outcomes. Assessing and Reforming Public Financial Management was written as part of the work of the Public Expenditure and Financial Accountability (PEFA) Program, a partnership of the World Bank, European Commission, IMF and several bilateral donor agencies that was established in December 2001.

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A snappy little book containing facts, jargon, and inside information--all that readers need to know to hold their own among the experts.

Customer Reviews:

if you like this book you're probably overeducated.......2000-06-13

This books reminds me of a sweatshirt that I have that rougly says in Latin "if you can read this you are overeducated". This is a witty, erudite lampoon of Roman and Greek life, literature, politics etc. The book is in the same vein as "1066 and All of That" a famous treatment of British history. However, like most satires , it helps to know the original. This is not a book for those ignorant of the Classical worlds. It is a great book for those who suffered through dead languages in high school & would like to pretend like they remember any of it. I also recomend Ross Leckie's other books: Hannibal and Scipio, which are fictional treatments (novels) of these military leader's lives. But, Leckie wraps a lot of wonderful detail around the tale so, the stories come to life.

Book Description

15 of Def Leppard's best from 1980 to 1995 in authentic guitar tab format. This album-matching collection includes: When Love and Hate Collide * Bringin' on the Heartbreak * Hysteria * Miss You in a Heartbeat * Two Steps Behind * Animal * Armageddon It * Foolin' * Let's Get Rocked * Love Bites * Photograph * Pour Some Sugar on Me * Rock of Ages * Rocket * Have You Ever Needed Someone So Bad. Includes great photos.

Customer Reviews:

Getting some experience.......1999-12-07

Awesome! Very detailed and somewhat easy for beginners to read...although I don't think I'll ever get it like they do!

Average customer rating:

Def Leppard Greatest Hits: Vault
Def Leppard
Manufacturer: Warner Bros.
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
ASIN: B000KX2CXA

Book Description

This digital document is an article from The Mississippi Quarterly, published by Mississippi State University on March 22, 2001. The length of the article is 940 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: Circling Dixie: Contemporary Southern Culture Through a Transatlantic Lens. (Book Reviews).(Review)
Author: Fred Hobson
Publication: The Mississippi Quarterly (Refereed)
Date: March 22, 2001
Publisher: Mississippi State University
Volume: 54 Issue: 2 Page: 276(3)

Article Type: Book Review

Distributed by Thomson Gale

Book Description

Pass the torch. Bring together the best of what has come before and the grandeur of the present to create an undreamed-of future, a radically different look. Create a new ship. Give life to mankind's greatest nightmare, made flesh and metal.

When the decision was made to take the hugely successful television series Star Trek: The Next Generation into the realm of motion pictures, the crew, special-effects artists, and costume and makeup designers knew that they had a wondrous opportunity and several unique challenges ahead. Could they translate this new crew to the big screen, while retaining the magic that made the series one of the most successful syndicated shows ever? Could they create even more "strange new worlds" and vistas for them to explore, on a scale that would inspire awe in its legion of fans? And, most crucially, in its maiden voyage could they meld the two "generations" of Star Trek? Could they find a way, visually, to pass the baton from The Original Series to the crew of The Next Generation?

Star Trek: The Next Generation Sketchbook -- The Movies explores the hectic, frantic and creative works of the movie artists ... first, as they valiantly endeavor to meet and overcome the challenges presented by Star Trek Generations, and then as they embark on the massive undertaking of The Next Generation crew's first solo flight, Star Trek, First Contact. The inception of the nexus, the destruction of a starship, the horrific face of the Borg, and the design of the U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-E all began with a single creative spark.

John Eaves, just one of the hundreds of craftspeople who worked their movie magic on Generations and First Contact, joins writer J.M. Dillard to take us on an odyssey into the mind's eye of some of the most visionary artists in the world of motion pictures. Through hundreds of never-before-seen sketches, model photographs and fashion designs, you'll see where it all began, and learn firsthand what it takes to transform the unenvisioned word into glorious reality.

Customer Reviews:

Tantalizing Taste..........2001-05-17

... of the behind-the-scenes design, artwork, and storyboarding for the first two Next Generation movies, "Generations" and "First Contact." Indispensible to a real starship hardware fan, this book gives plenty of details and is interspersed with interviews, recollections, and notes from some of the principal talents involved in creating the location sets, some of the special effects, and the new ships seen in both films, as well as much unseen material from the design of the Borg presence. I found the evolution of the Enterprise-E, Phoenix warp ship, and Vulcan ship from First Contact especially interesting. My only criticism is that, even at 340+ pages, there is not enough! First Contact alone should occupy a 400-page "Making of" book. Nevertheless, this volume is a gem which belongs in the library of any hard-core Trek devotee.

The definitive book of Star Trek art........1999-08-05

Not only is this volume a must for anyone interested in production design, it is also a well designed book all round. Each page is a stunning work of art in its own right. Full compliments to John Eaves for so carefully selecting his, and other artist's work, for the book. His commentary throughout is informative and interesting. JM Dillard holds it all together with his, as always, brilliant text. I hope Eaves releses a new book about Insurrection, or at least, has the existing book expanded to include this film. Well done, S&S, John Eaves and JM Dillard.

NextGen Sketchbook best non-fic Trek in thirty years.......1998-04-13

I interviewed John Eaves two years ago and first heard about this book at that time; I am more than slightly relieved to say that it was worth the wait! Profusely illustrated -- with artwork that has NOT already appeared everywhere else -- the book is both reader- and Trekkie-friendly, with brief anecdotes which humanize the filmmaking process while also supplementing the nice pics. Eaves' attention to detail -- especially in regard to properly crediting those responsible for a given design -- is both noteworthy and surprisingly welcome ... This book almost makes up for previous "authorized" illustrated Trek volumes, nearly making me forgive Pocket/S&S for THE ART OF STAR TREK, and gives cause for one to hope Eaves will contribute in a similar fashion to STAR TREK 9. (and generate another book like this as well.)

Star Trek Sketchbook & Star Trek Next Generation Sketchbook: The Movies

Average customer rating:

The most original book of original series

Star Trek Sketchbook & Star Trek Next Generation Sketchbook: The Movies
Herbert F. Solow , Yvonne Fern Solow , John Eaves , and J. M. Dillard
Manufacturer: Pocket Books
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: 0671717596

Customer Reviews:

The most original book of original series.......2000-04-04

This book is one of the better for a Star Trek's fan. In their chapters are many sketches and original pieces of the series. The designs of Matt Jefferies for the sets, (Part1), the design of the original Enterprise, (- born almost like a Warbird?-, Parts 2,3 & 4), the shuttlecraft and the weapons (Parts 5 & 6). Brillant the Part 7 with The Lost Set and the original scale model of it, (great ! ). The following chapters show the wardrobe by William Ware Theiss in sketches and tests, the make-ups of Fred Phillips (the ears of Spock, the green skin and deformity of Vina, klingons, romulans, etc.), and the accessories created by Wah Ming Chang, (did you know that he received a payment of U$S 520.00 for the design of the original phaser ?). This book shows the courage and innocence of those first pioneers that created the most famous adventure of the Universe, Star Trek.

Amazon.com's Best of 2001

Peer-to-Peer is a book about an emerging idea. That idea is that the traditional model of participating in the Internet, in which a small computer operated by an everyday user (a "client") asks for and receives information from a big computer administered by a corporation or other large entity (a "server"), is beginning to give some ground to a new (new to the fringes of the Internet, anyway) model called peer-to-peer networking. In peer-to-peer networking, all participants in a network are approximately equal. Furthermore, the participants are usually ordinary computers run by everyday people. The ICQ chat service and the Napster music-sharing community are examples of what this book is about.

The chief advantage of peer-to-peer networks is that large numbers of people share the burden of providing computing resources (processor time and disk space), administration effort, creativity, and--in more than a few cases--legal liability. Furthermore, it's relatively easy to be anonymous in such an environment, and it's harder for opponents of your peer-to-peer service to bring it down. The primary disadvantage of peer-to-peer systems, as anyone will attest who's had an MP3 download prematurely terminated when a dialup user went offline will attest, is the tendency of computers at the edge of the network to fade in and out of availability. Accountability for the actions of network participants is a potential problem, too.

This is a book about the idea of equipping ordinary Internet users' computers with mechanisms that enable them to connect, more or less automatically and without human attention, to other everyday Internet users' machines. By forming networks of computers at the so-called "edge" of the Internet, it's possible to offer valuable services without the burden of building and administering large, centralized computer systems of the sort that host traditional Web sites. Napster is the most successful example to date, though nerds will note that it's not a completely peer-to-peer system because users register their file libraries with a central server when they log on to the service.

Don't approach this book expecting to learn how to build the next Napster system. It's not a how-to book. It's not even much of a why-to book. Rather, it's a book that aims to get its readers thinking about what happens when information systems shift away from the client-server model and toward the peer-to-peer model (that's one of the book's points, by the way, that this is not a one-or-the-other architectural decision).

Mostly, Peer-to-Peer makes its point by letting experts in peer-to-peer take turns in the spotlight. Any other approach would be kind of ironic, wouldn't it? In any case, David Anderson explains how SETI@home puts space buffs' idle computing cycles to use in analyzing radio noise from outer space. Gene Kan explains how Gnutella (a truly serverless environment) works. The architects of Publius explain how distributed computing is especially resistant to censorship and denial-of-service attacks. Other contributors discuss peer-to-peer chat software, anonymous remailing services, and other applications of peer-to-peer design.

There's no one from Napster represented as an author in this collection of essays, but Clay Shirky presents an essay called "Listening to Napster." In that essay, Shirky gives an opinion on why Napster has succeeded: It focused on providing something consumers wanted, and bypassed Internet conventions (like the Domain Naming System) because they weren't the best way to provide the service. This is not an earth-shattering revelation, but it's true, and it's something developers of any new service (Internet-based or otherwise) need to keep in mind.

Some of the technical proposals presented here will get readers thinking. An example: Require that senders of e-mail solve a moderately complex math problem before recipients' mailboxes will accept their mail. The problem would be no big deal for a mailer to solve if he or she were sending messages one at a time, but the processor load would really add up for spammers who blast tens of thousands of unwanted emails onto the Internet in a single session. Another idea: mechanizing the concept of reputation so people know whose thoughts and whose creative works (like software) are worth using or believing.

More business-oriented readers might want to read more about the more subtle ways of incorporating peer-to-peer components into business models. Lots of traditional Web services--Amazon.com is an example--are supplementing their client-server activities with others that have peer-to-peer characteristics. Amazon.com, for example, lets operators of small Web sites promote goods and rely on the centralized resources for billing and fulfillment. There's no distributed software (other than a few links), but the company takes advantage of creativity and marketing efforts outside of its official core. Coverage of that sort of "soft" distributed computing might be a good supplement for the second edition of this book.

Peer-to-Peer is a thought-provoking book that will help its readers understand an exciting, still-emerging application architecture for the Internet. --David Wall

Topics covered: Peer-to-peer applications that run at the edges of the Internet, usually on home computers run by ordinary people. Much of this book comprises case studies on SETI@home, Gnutella, Freenet, Jabber, and other peer-to-peer services. Later chapters address technical issues, such as accountability, security, efficient use of limited bandwidth, and data cataloging.

Book Description

The term "peer-to-peer" has come to be applied to networks that expect end users to contribute their own files, computing time, or other resources to some shared project. Even more interesting than the systems' technical underpinnings are their socially disruptive potential: in various ways they return content, choice, and control to ordinary users. While this book is mostly about the technical promise of peer-to-peer, we also talk about its exciting social promise. Communities have been forming on the Internet for a long time, but they have been limited by the flat interactive qualities of email and Network newsgroups. People can exchange recommendations and ideas over these media, but have great difficulty commenting on each other's postings, structuring information, performing searches, or creating summaries. If tools provided ways to organize information intelligently, and if each person could serve up his or her own data and retrieve others' data, the possibilities for collaboration would take off. Peer-to-peer technologies along with metadata could enhance almost any group of people who share an interest--technical, cultural, political, medical, you name it. This book presents the goals that drive the developers of the best-known peer-to-peer systems, the problems they've faced, and the technical solutions they've found. Learn here the essentials of peer-to-peer from leaders of the field:

Nelson Minar and Marc Hedlund of target="new"> Popular Power, on a history of peer-to-peer
Clay Shirky of acceleratorgroup, on where peer-to-peer is likely to be headed
Tim O'Reilly of O'Reilly & Associates, on redefining the public's perceptions
Dan Bricklin, cocreator of Visicalc, on harvesting information from end-users
David Anderson of SETI@home, on how SETI@Home created the world's largest computer
Jeremie Miller of Jabber, on the Internet as a collection of conversations
Gene Kan of Gnutella and GoneSilent.com, on lessons from Gnutella for peer-to-peer technologies
Adam Langley of Freenet, on Freenet's present and upcoming architecture
Alan Brown of Red Rover, on a deliberately low-tech content distribution system
Marc Waldman, Lorrie Cranor, and Avi Rubin of AT&T Labs, on the Publius project and trust in distributed systems
Roger Dingledine, Michael J. Freedman, and David Molnar of Free Haven, on resource allocation and accountability in distributed systems
Rael Dornfest of O'Reilly Network and Dan Brickley of ILRT/RDF Web, on metadata
Theodore Hong of Freenet, on performance
Richard Lethin of Reputation Technologies, on how reputation can be built online
Jon Udell of BYTE and Nimisha Asthagiri and Walter Tuvell of Groove Networks, on security
Brandon Wiley of Freenet, on gateways between peer-to-peer systems

You'll find information on the latest and greatest systems as well as upcoming efforts in this book.

Customer Reviews:

This book changed my life.......2005-11-22

I work in the MP3 player industry, so the title of my review is only a slight exaggeration. P2P technology created the MP3 revolution. This book takes an honest look back at where P2P came from and where it is going from several different viewpoints. I think it is a must-read for anyone working on the future architecture of computing technology. And it is just plain interesting if you are sitting on the sidelines--and you might just find a role you can play in the game.

Still the best overview I know of.......2005-09-22

It's five years old by now, which is a long time in this industry, but the book remains relevant by virtue of the solid writing and lack of fluff that we expect from O'Reilly, and by the third section's excellent in-depth coverage of fundamental issues: Performance, Trust, Accountability, Reputation, Security. Each of these has a lot of valuable information, references and ideas.

Particularly valuable to me were the discussions of:
- Analyzing and optimizing peer connection graphs
- How Groove uses cryptography to protect and authenticate data
- Using token economies and "nonfungible micropayments" to avoid denial-of-service attacks
- How trust relationships can be tracked

The coverage of specific technologies hasn't aged quite as well. There's too much on things that either never went anywhere (Red Rover?) or are extremely primitive by today's standards (Gnutella), while very important more recent ones like BitTorrent and Kademlia are understandably missing.

Still, as I said, I don't think there's a better book out there. I've bought others and been disappointed by their superficiality, even the "academic" books. Buy this one, and then be prepared to do some intensive web searching/surfing for research papers to catch up on later developments like Distributed Hash Tables, BitTorrent, Kademlia, Chord, Pastry, Coral, JXTA, PNRP, Bonjour...

Excellent coverage of p2p.......2004-03-13

In 2000, O'Reilly surveyed the field of peer-to-peer computing, and published this book. It has an excellent description of the key concepts behind all the major p2p implementations then existing. Napster, of course, was the best known. But Seti@home, Gnutella, Jabber, Freenet, Free Haven and others are also explained. These are compared with each other, so that you can see the different emphases and strengths of each.

Since the book's release, p2p usage has grown, and the attendant controversy about the downloading of copyrighted material, mainly music, has continued unabated. Napster in its original incarnation has gone. But other p2p networks, like Kazaa, have arisen.

Another type of p2p network has also emerged - for social networks. Companies include Friendster, Tribe.net, Ryze and others. Of course, these aren't covered in the book, because they did not exist when it was written. But as a measure of how comprehensive the book is, one of its chapters describes the key work on social networks and encompasses this entire group of companies.

The technical level is moderate throughout the book. While XML, SOAP and cryptography are described, you only need slight familiarity with these topics. The discussion involving them tends to be at a higher level of usage.

dasper.......2002-07-26

I've been a big fan of O'Reilly & Associates for years because of their consistent ability to provide highly readable and accurate technical books, often about technologies I find fascinating and useful. To me the editorial bias of most of those books is simply the love of the technology they describe. But O'Reilly has increasingly become a force in the organization and direction of new technologies. And it is that aspect of this book on P2P which has made the biggest impression on me. This book is different from the many other O'Reilly books I've read because it discusses the publisher's own ideas about P2P and involvement with it.

A Great Summary.......2001-12-13

This book provides a great summary of current P2P projects and the technologies used. It is non-technical book that would be a great intro to P2P, especially for "suits" who only think of Napster when you mention the word P2P. There are loads of gems in this text; I recommend this book to any computer enthusiast.

The chapters start out strong, but I lost interest in a few of latter chapters, which tend to be a little redundant. There seemed to be a little too much emphasis on decentralized systems and anonymous file sharing. A few chapters appear to focus on broad topics but actually focus on the particular author's project. For Example, the security chapter was more or less an overview of grove networks. Another characteristic of this text is the fact that its basically 19 separate papers rolled in to one book so don't expect it to flow.

Average customer rating:
Peer-to-Peer : Harnessing the Power of Disruptive Technologies
Andy; Kan, Gene; Miller, Jeremy Orem
Manufacturer: O'Reilly & Associates, Incorporated
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
ASIN: B000JOXXBU

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