Matthew Innes
State And Society In The Early Middle Ages
The middle Rhine valley was a region whose geopolitical profile underwent a series of dramatic changes between the late Roman period and the high middle ages, changes which affected the relationship of the region to the political centre. In this Roman frontier province political power was transformed by the Imperial infrastructure, which led to the foundation of fortified settlements as the central points of local society, an influx of men and resources in the army, and, in the fourth century, the physical proximity of the Emperor. Eventually, in the fifth century, the middle Rhine found itself cut off from the redistributive system of the Roman army and administration. A new power structure, which expressed itself in the idiom of a ‘frontier culture’ which had developed through the interaction of barbarian elites and the Roman military, had emerged by the sixth century. The change from Roman to post-Roman, the atrophy of institutionalised forms of power and the emergence of militarised rule which tapped the agrarian surplus directly, was far more abrupt here than elsewhere in Gaul. By 600, rulers began once again to be involved in the region directly; rulers based, as they had been in the fourth century, in northern Gaul, but increasingly interested in exploitation of the ‘wild east’, the provinces beyond the Rhine, and happy to stay at Worms and Mainz. In the second half of the eighth century, the final consolidation of Frankish royal power in the east placed the Rhine at the heart of Empire, a development consummated by the construction of magnificent palace complexes at Ingelheim and Frankfurt. The symbolic significance of these centres, and the geopolitical centrality of the region, meant that the middle Rhine remained a royal heartland to the end of the early medieval period and beyond.

Studio Classroom Advanced June 2007 ISO
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Just For Fun: The Story of An Accidental Revolutionary
The autobiography of a career computer programmer, even an unorthodox one, may sound less than enthralling, but this breezy account of the life of Linux inventor Torvalds not only lives up to its insouciant title, it provides an incisive look into the still-raging debate over open source code. In his own words (interspersed with co-writer Diamond's tongue-in-cheek accounts of his interviews with the absentminded Torvalds), the programmer relates how it all started in 1981 with his grandfather back in Finland, who let him play around on a Vic 20 computer. At 11 years old, Torvalds was hooked on computersespecially on figuring out how they ran and on improving their operating systems. For years, Torvalds did little but program, upgrading his hardware every couple of years, attending school in a desultory fashion and generally letting the outside world float by unnoticed, until he eventually wrote his own operating system, Linux. In a radical move, he began sharing the code with fellow OS enthusiasts over the burgeoning Internet in the early 1990s, allowing others to contribute to and improve it, while he oversaw the process. Even though Torvalds is now a bigger star in the computer world than Bill Gates, and companies like IBM are running Linux on their servers, he has retained his innocence: the book is full of statements like "Open source makes sense" and "Greed is never good" that seem sincere. Leavened with an appealing, self-deprecating sense of humor and a generous perspective that few hardcore coders have, this is a refreshing read for geeks and the techno-obsessed.