Download or read book Your Computer Is on Fire written by Thomas S. Mullaney and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2021-03-09 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Technology scholars declare an emergency: attention must be paid to the inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into our technological systems. This book sounds an alarm: we can no longer afford to be lulled into complacency by narratives of techno-utopianism, or even techno-neutrality. We should not be reassured by such soothing generalities as "human error," "virtual reality," or "the cloud." We need to realize that nothing is virtual: everything that "happens online," "virtually," or "autonomously" happens offline first, and often involves human beings whose labor is deliberately kept invisible. Everything is IRL. In Your Computer Is on Fire, technology scholars train a spotlight on the inequality, marginalization, and biases woven into our technological systems.
Download or read book Kill It with Fire written by Marianne Bellotti and published by No Starch Press. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kill It with Fire chronicles the challenges of dealing with aging computer systems, along with sound modernization strategies. How to survive a legacy apocalypse “Kill it with fire,” the typical first reaction to a legacy system falling into obsolescence, is a knee-jerk approach that often burns through tons of money and time only to result in a less efficient solution. This book offers a far more forgiving modernization framework, laying out smart value-add strategies and proven techniques that work equally well for ancient systems and brand-new ones. Renowned for restoring some of the world’s oldest, messiest computer networks to operational excellence, software engineering expert Marianne Bellotti distills key lessons and insights from her experience into practical, research-backed guidance to help you determine when and how to modernize. With witty, engaging prose, Bellotti explains why new doesn’t always mean better, weaving in illuminating case studies and anecdotes from her work in the field. You’ll learn: Where to focus your maintenance efforts for maximum impact and value How to pick the right modernization solutions for your specific needs and keep your plans on track How to assess whether your migrations will add value before you invest in them What to consider before moving data to the cloud How to determine when a project is finished Packed with resources, exercises, and flexible frameworks for organizations of all ages and sizes, Kill It with Fire will give you a vested interest in your technology’s future.
Download or read book Fire in the Valley written by Michael Swaine and published by Pragmatic Bookshelf. This book was released on 2014-10-20 with total page 602 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1970s, while their contemporaries were protesting the computer as a tool of dehumanization and oppression, a motley collection of college dropouts, hippies, and electronics fanatics were engaged in something much more subversive. Obsessed with the idea of getting computer power into their own hands, they launched from their garages a hobbyist movement that grew into an industry, and ultimately a social and technological revolution. What they did was invent the personal computer: not just a new device, but a watershed in the relationship between man and machine. This is their story. Fire in the Valley is the definitive history of the personal computer, drawn from interviews with the people who made it happen, written by two veteran computer writers who were there from the start. Working at InfoWorld in the early 1980s, Swaine and Freiberger daily rubbed elbows with people like Steve Jobs and Bill Gates when they were creating the personal computer revolution. A rich story of colorful individuals, Fire in the Valley profiles these unlikely revolutionaries and entrepreneurs, such as Ed Roberts of MITS, Lee Felsenstein at Processor Technology, and Jack Tramiel of Commodore, as well as Jobs and Gates in all the innocence of their formative years. This completely revised and expanded third edition brings the story to its completion, chronicling the end of the personal computer revolution and the beginning of the post-PC era. It covers the departure from the stage of major players with the deaths of Steve Jobs and Douglas Engelbart and the retirements of Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer; the shift away from the PC to the cloud and portable devices; and what the end of the PC era means for issues such as personal freedom and power, and open source vs. proprietary software.
Download or read book The New Fire written by Ben Buchanan and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2024-03-05 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: AI is revolutionizing the world. Here’s how democracies can come out on top. Artificial intelligence is revolutionizing the modern world. It is ubiquitous—in our homes and offices, in the present and most certainly in the future. Today, we encounter AI as our distant ancestors once encountered fire. If we manage AI well, it will become a force for good, lighting the way to many transformative inventions. If we deploy it thoughtlessly, it will advance beyond our control. If we wield it for destruction, it will fan the flames of a new kind of war, one that holds democracy in the balance. As AI policy experts Ben Buchanan and Andrew Imbrie show in The New Fire, few choices are more urgent—or more fascinating—than how we harness this technology and for what purpose. The new fire has three sparks: data, algorithms, and computing power. These components fuel viral disinformation campaigns, new hacking tools, and military weapons that once seemed like science fiction. To autocrats, AI offers the prospect of centralized control at home and asymmetric advantages in combat. It is easy to assume that democracies, bound by ethical constraints and disjointed in their approach, will be unable to keep up. But such a dystopia is hardly preordained. Combining an incisive understanding of technology with shrewd geopolitical analysis, Buchanan and Imbrie show how AI can work for democracy. With the right approach, technology need not favor tyranny.
Download or read book A Fire Upon The Deep written by Vernor Vinge and published by Tor Science Fiction. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 626 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now with a new introduction for the Tor Essentials line, A Fire Upon the Deep is sure to bring a new generation of SF fans to Vinge's award-winning works. A Hugo Award-winning Novel! “Vinge is one of the best visionary writers of SF today.”-David Brin Thousands of years in the future, humanity is no longer alone in a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures, and technology, can function. Nobody knows what strange force partitioned space into these "regions of thought," but when the warring Straumli realm use an ancient Transcendent artifact as a weapon, they unwittingly unleash an awesome power that destroys thousands of worlds and enslaves all natural and artificial intelligence. Fleeing this galactic threat, Ravna crash lands on a strange world with a ship-hold full of cryogenically frozen children, the only survivors from a destroyed space-lab. They are taken captive by the Tines, an alien race with a harsh medieval culture, and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle. Tor books by Vernor Vinge Zones of Thought Series A Fire Upon The Deep A Deepness In The Sky The Children of The Sky Realtime/Bobble Series The Peace War Marooned in Realtime Other Novels The Witling Tatja Grimm's World Rainbows End Collections Collected Stories of Vernor Vinge True Names At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
Download or read book Young Men and Fire written by Norman MacLean and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05-01 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Critics Circle Award Winner: “The terrifying story of the worst disaster in the history of the US Forest Service’s elite Smokejumpers.” —Kirkus Reviews A devastating and lyrical work of nonfiction, Young Men and Fire describes the events of August 5, 1949, when a crew of fifteen of the US Forest Service’s elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of the men were dead or mortally burned. Haunted by these deaths for forty years, Norman Maclean puts together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy in this extraordinary book. Alongside Maclean’s now-canonical A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, Young Men and Fire is recognized today as a classic of the American West. This edition of Maclean’s later triumph—the last book he would write—includes a powerful new foreword by Timothy Egan, author of The Big Burn and The Worst Hard Time. As moving and profound as when it was first published, Young Men and Fire honors the literary legacy of a man who gave voice to an essential corner of the American soul. “A moving account of humanity, nature, and the perseverance of the human spirit.” —Library Journal “Haunting.” —The Wall Street Journal “Engrossing.” —Publishers Weekly
Download or read book Computer Related Risks written by Peter G. Neumann and published by Addison-Wesley Professional. This book was released on 1994-10-18 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This sobering description of many computer-related failures throughout our world deflates the hype and hubris of the industry. Peter Neumann analyzes the failure modes, recommends sequences for prevention and ends his unique book with some broadening reflections on the future." —Ralph Nader, Consumer Advocate This book is much more than a collection of computer mishaps; it is a serious, technically oriented book written by one of the world's leading experts on computer risks. The book summarizes many real events involving computer technologies and the people who depend on those technologies, with widely ranging causes and effects. It considers problems attributable to hardware, software, people, and natural causes. Examples include disasters (such as the Black Hawk helicopter and Iranian Airbus shootdowns, the Exxon Valdez, and various transportation accidents); malicious hacker attacks; outages of telephone systems and computer networks; financial losses; and many other strange happenstances (squirrels downing power grids, and April Fool's Day pranks). Computer-Related Risks addresses problems involving reliability, safety, security, privacy, and human well-being. It includes analyses of why these cases happened and discussions of what might be done to avoid recurrences of similar events. It is readable by technologists as well as by people merely interested in the uses and limits of technology. It is must reading for anyone with even a remote involvement with computers and communications—which today means almost everyone. Computer-Related Risks: Presents comprehensive coverage of many different types of risks Provides an essential system-oriented perspective Shows how technology can affect your life—whether you like it or not!
Download or read book Code written by Charles Petzold and published by Microsoft Press. This book was released on 2022-08-02 with total page 563 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The classic guide to how computers work, updated with new chapters and interactive graphics "For me, Code was a revelation. It was the first book about programming that spoke to me. It started with a story, and it built up, layer by layer, analogy by analogy, until I understood not just the Code, but the System. Code is a book that is as much about Systems Thinking and abstractions as it is about code and programming. Code teaches us how many unseen layers there are between the computer systems that we as users look at every day and the magical silicon rocks that we infused with lightning and taught to think." - Scott Hanselman, Partner Program Director, Microsoft, and host of Hanselminutes Computers are everywhere, most obviously in our laptops and smartphones, but also our cars, televisions, microwave ovens, alarm clocks, robot vacuum cleaners, and other smart appliances. Have you ever wondered what goes on inside these devices to make our lives easier but occasionally more infuriating? For more than 20 years, readers have delighted in Charles Petzold's illuminating story of the secret inner life of computers, and now he has revised it for this new age of computing. Cleverly illustrated and easy to understand, this is the book that cracks the mystery. You'll discover what flashlights, black cats, seesaws, and the ride of Paul Revere can teach you about computing, and how human ingenuity and our compulsion to communicate have shaped every electronic device we use. This new expanded edition explores more deeply the bit-by-bit and gate-by-gate construction of the heart of every smart device, the central processing unit that combines the simplest of basic operations to perform the most complex of feats. Petzold's companion website, CodeHiddenLanguage.com, uses animated graphics of key circuits in the book to make computers even easier to comprehend. In addition to substantially revised and updated content, new chapters include: Chapter 18: Let's Build a Clock! Chapter 21: The Arithmetic Logic Unit Chapter 22: Registers and Busses Chapter 23: CPU Control Signals Chapter 24: Jumps, Loops, and Calls Chapter 28: The World Brain From the simple ticking of clocks to the worldwide hum of the internet, Code reveals the essence of the digital revolution.
Download or read book But how Do it Know written by J. Clark Scott and published by John C Scott. This book was released on 2009 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book thoroughly explains how computers work. It starts by fully examining a NAND gate, then goes on to build every piece and part of a small, fully operational computer. The necessity and use of codes is presented in parallel with the apprioriate pieces of hardware. The book can be easily understood by anyone whether they have a technical background or not. It could be used as a textbook.
Download or read book Programmed Inequality written by Mar Hicks and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2018-02-23 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This “sobering tale of the real consequences of gender bias” explores how Britain lost its early dominance in computing by systematically discriminating against its most qualified workers: women (Harvard Magazine) In 1944, Britain led the world in electronic computing. By 1974, the British computer industry was all but extinct. What happened in the intervening thirty years holds lessons for all postindustrial superpowers. As Britain struggled to use technology to retain its global power, the nation’s inability to manage its technical labor force hobbled its transition into the information age. In Programmed Inequality, Mar Hicks explores the story of labor feminization and gendered technocracy that undercut British efforts to computerize. That failure sprang from the government’s systematic neglect of its largest trained technical workforce simply because they were women. Women were a hidden engine of growth in high technology from World War II to the 1960s. As computing experienced a gender flip, becoming male-identified in the 1960s and 1970s, labor problems grew into structural ones and gender discrimination caused the nation’s largest computer user—the civil service and sprawling public sector—to make decisions that were disastrous for the British computer industry and the nation as a whole. Drawing on recently opened government files, personal interviews, and the archives of major British computer companies, Programmed Inequality takes aim at the fiction of technological meritocracy. Hicks explains why, even today, possessing technical skill is not enough to ensure that women will rise to the top in science and technology fields. Programmed Inequality shows how the disappearance of women from the field had grave macroeconomic consequences for Britain, and why the United States risks repeating those errors in the twenty-first century.
Download or read book Fire in the Valley written by Paul Freiberger and published by McGraw-Hill Companies. This book was released on 2000 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Definitive account of how the PC came to transform the world today- and will shape the century ahead.
Download or read book Computer written by Martin Campbell-Kelly and published by Hachette UK. This book was released on 2013-07-09 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Computer: A History of the Information Machine traces the history of the computer and shows how business and government were the first to explore its unlimited, information-processing potential. Old-fashioned entrepreneurship combined with scientific know-how inspired now famous computer engineers to create the technology that became IBM. Wartime needs drove the giant ENIAC, the first fully electronic computer. Later, the PC enabled modes of computing that liberated people from room-sized, mainframe computers. This third edition provides updated analysis on software and computer networking, including new material on the programming profession, social networking, and mobile computing. It expands its focus on the IT industry with fresh discussion on the rise of Google and Facebook as well as how powerful applications are changing the way we work, consume, learn, and socialize. Computer is an insightful look at the pace of technological advancement and the seamless way computers are integrated into the modern world. Through comprehensive history and accessible writing, Computer is perfect for courses on computer history, technology history, and information and society, as well as a range of courses in the fields of computer science, communications, sociology, and management.
Download or read book Essentials of Computer Organization and Architecture written by Linda Null and published by Jones & Bartlett Learning. This book was released on 2014-02-12 with total page 945 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Updated and revised, The Essentials of Computer Organization and Architecture, Third Edition is a comprehensive resource that addresses all of the necessary organization and architecture topics, yet is appropriate for the one-term course.
Download or read book A Gift of Fire written by Sara Baase and published by Prentice Hall. This book was released on 2013 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This timely revision will feature the latest Internet issues and provide an updated comprehensive look at social and ethical issues in computing from a computer science perspective.
Download or read book Fire Road written by Kim Phuc Phan Thi and published by NavPress. This book was released on 2017-10-03 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Get out! Run! We must leave this place! They are going to destroy this whole place! Go, children, run first! Go now! These were the final shouts nine year-old Kim Phuc heard before her world dissolved into flames—before napalm bombs fell from the sky, burning away her clothing and searing deep into her skin. It’s a moment forever captured, an iconic image that has come to define the horror and violence of the Vietnam War. Kim was left for dead in a morgue; no one expected her to survive the attack. Napalm meant fire, and fire meant death. Against all odds, Kim lived—but her journey toward healing was only beginning. When the napalm bombs dropped, everything Kim knew and relied on exploded along with them: her home, her country’s freedom, her childhood innocence and happiness. The coming years would be marked by excruciating treatments for her burns and unrelenting physical pain throughout her body, which were constant reminders of that terrible day. Kim survived the pain of her body ablaze, but how could she possibly survive the pain of her devastated soul? Fire Road is the true story of how she found the answer in a God who suffered Himself; a Savior who truly understood and cared about the depths of her pain. Fire Road is a story of horror and hope, a harrowing tale of a life changed in an instant—and the power and resilience that can only be found in the power of God’s mercy and love.
Download or read book Brain on Fire written by Susannah Cahalan and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 294 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING CHLOË GRACE MORETZ A “captivating” (The New York Times Book Review), award-winning memoir and instant New York Times bestseller that goes far beyond its riveting medical mystery, Brain on Fire is a powerful account of one woman’s struggle to recapture her identity. When twenty-four-year-old Susannah Cahalan woke up alone in a hospital room, strapped to her bed and unable to move or speak, she had no memory of how she’d gotten there. Days earlier, she had been on the threshold of a new, adult life: at the beginning of her first serious relationship and a promising career at a major New York newspaper. Now she was labeled as violent, psychotic, a flight risk. What happened? In an “unforgettable” (Elle), “stunningly brave” (NPR), and breathtaking narrative, Susannah tells the astonishing true story of her descent into madness, her family’s inspiring faith in her, and the lifesaving diagnosis that almost didn’t happen. “A fascinating look at the disease that…could have cost this vibrant, vital young woman her life” (People), Brain on Fire is an unforgettable exploration of memory and identity, faith and love, and a profoundly compelling tale of survival and perseverance.
Download or read book Amazon Fire TV For Dummies written by Paul McFedries and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2019-12-17 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enjoy more entertainment with this friendly user guide to making the most of Amazon Fire TV! Find and watch more of the shows you enjoy with Amazon Fire TV For Dummies. This book guides you through Fire TV connections and setup and then shows you how to get the most out of your device. This guide is the convenient way to access quick viewing tips, so there’s no need to search online for information or feel frustrated. With this book by your side, you’ll quickly feel right at home with your streaming device. Content today can be complicated. You want to watch shows on a variety of sources, such as Hulu, Amazon Prime, Netflix, and the top premium channels. Amazon’s media device organizes the streaming of today’s popular content services. It lets you use a single interface to connect to the entertainment you can’t wait to watch. This book helps you navigate your Fire TV to find the content you really want. It will show you how to see your favorite movies, watch binge-worthy TV shows, and even play games on Fire TV. Get the information you need to set up and start using Fire TV. Understand the basics of how to use the device Explore an array of useful features and streaming opportunities Learn techniques to become a streaming pro Conquer the world of Fire TV with one easy-to-understand book. Soon you’ll be discovering the latest popcorn-worthy shows.
