249 results for "Computers"

Steve Jobs

Walter Isaacson
Walter Isaacson’s “enthralling” ( The New Yorker ) worldwide bestselling biography of Apple cofounder Steve Jobs. Based on more than forty interviews with Steve Jobs conducted over two years—as well as interviews with more than 100 family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues—Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. At a time when America is seeking ways to sustain its innovative edge, Jobs stands as the ultimate icon of inventiveness and applied imagination. He knew that the best way to create value in 21st century was to connect creativity with technology. He built a company where leaps of the imagination were combined with remarkable feats of engineering. Although Jobs cooperated with the author, he asked for no control over what was written. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted. Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system. His tale is instructive and cautionary, filled with lessons about innovation, character, leadership, and values. Steve Jobs is the inspiration for the movie of the same name starring Michael Fassbender, Kate Winslet, Seth Rogen, and Jeff Daniels, directed by Danny Boyle with a screenplay by Aaron Sorkin.
Simon and Schuster 2021-10-05 672 pages

21 lessons for the 21st century

Harari, Yuval N.
How do computers and robots change the meaning of being human? How do we deal with the epidemic of fake news? Are nations and religions still relevant? What should we teach our children? As technology advances faster than our understanding of it, hacking becomes a tactic of war, and the world feels more polarized than ever, Yuval Harari addresses the challenge of navigating life in the face of constant and disorienting change and raises the important questions we need to ask ourselves in order to survive. How can we retain freedom of choice when Big Data is watching us? What will the future workforce look like, and how should we ready ourselves for it? How should we deal with the threat of terrorism? Why is liberal democracy in crisis? Harari invites us to consider values, meaning, and personal engagement in a world full of noise and uncertainty. When we are deluged with irrelevant information, clarity is power.
Spiegel & Grau 2018 384 pages

The language instinct

Pinker, Steven
Everyone has questions about language. Some are from everyday experience: Why do immigrants struggle with a new language, only to have their fluent children ridicule their grammatical errors? Why can't computers converse with us? Why is the hockey team in Toronto called the Maple Leafs, not the Maple Leaves? Some are from popular science: Have scientists really reconstructed the first language spoken on earth? Are there genes for grammar? Can chimpanzees learn sign language? And some are from our deepest ponderings about the human condition: Does our language control our thoughts? How could language have evolved? Is language deteriorating? Today laypeople can chitchat about black holes and dinosaur extinctions, but their curiosity about their own speech has been left unsatisfied--until now. In The Language Instinct, Steven Pinker, one of the world's leading scientists of language and the mind, lucidly explains everything you always wanted to know about language: how it works, how children learn it, how it changes, how the brain computes it, how it evolved. But The Language Instinct is no encyclopedia. With wit, erudition, and deft use of everyday examples of humor and wordplay, Pinker weaves our vast knowledge of language into a compelling theory: that language is a human instinct, wired into our brains by evolution like web spinning in spiders or sonar in bats. The theory not only challenges conventional wisdom about language itself (especially from the self-appointed "experts" who claim to be safeguarding the language but who understand it less well than a typical teenager). It is part of a whole new vision of the human mind: not a general-purpose computer, but a collection of instincts adapted to solving evolutionarily significant problems--the mind as a Swiss Army knife. Entertaining, insightful, provocative, The Language Instinct will change the way you talk about talking and think about thinking
W. Morrow and Co 1994 494 pages

Algorithm Design

Jon Kleinberg,Éva Tardos
"Algorithm Design takes a fresh approach to the algorithms course, introducing algorithmic ideas through the real-world problems that motivate them. In a clear, direct style, Jon Kleinberg and Eva Tardos teach students to analyze and define problems for themselves, and from this to recognize which design principles are appropriate for a given situation. The text encourages a greater understanding of the algorithm design process and an appreciation of the role of algorithms in the broader field of computer science." --Book Jacket.
Pearson/Addison-Wesley 2006 838 pages

Until the End of Time

Danielle Steel
This cloth-bound special edition of Danielle Steel's Until the End of Time is enhanced with gold leaf, comes with a special slip case, and is signed by the author. Two couples, four decades apart. One believes that if lovers die, they find each other again in another life. Or perhaps they wind up as stars side by side in the sky, together forever. Who knows how it really ends? Danielle Steel breaks new ground in her career as a perennial New York Times bestseller with the poignant story of two parallel destinies, and the kind of love we all hope will be everlasting. UNTIL THE END OF TIME Bill is a dedicated young lawyer working at his family's prestigious New York firm who leaves everything he trained for to follow his dream and become a minister in rural Wyoming. Jenny, his wife, is a stylist whose heart and soul are invested in fashion. She leaves the milieu and life she loves to join him. The certainty they share is that their destinies are linked forever. Fast forward thirty-eight years. Robert is a hardworking independent book publisher in Manhattan, who has given up all personal life to build his struggling business. He is looking for one big hit novel to publish. Lillibet is a young Amish woman, living as though in the seventeenth century, caring for her widowed father and three young brothers on their family farm. In secret at night, by candlelight, she has written the novel that burns within her, and gets it into Robert's hands, wrapped in her hand-stitched apron. He falls in love first with the book, and then with the woman he has never met, living in the sequestered world of the Amish--a world without telephones, computers, electricity, modern conveniences, or cars. Although Lillibet faces banishment from her family and community, she embraces the opportunity to publish her novel, and is irresistibly drawn to the man who has heard her voice. Destiny is at work here. Fate draws her from her horse-and-buggy life toward his, and the publication of her novel. In the hands of master storyteller Danielle Steel, these two remarkable relationships come together in unexpected and surprising ways, as lovers are lost, and find each other again. If it is true that real love lasts forever and lovers cannot lose each other, then Until the End of Time will not only comfort and fascinate us, as destiny does her dance, but it will give us hope as well. Love and fate are powerful, irresistible forces, as Steel proves to us here, in a book about courage, change, risk, and hope . . . and love that never dies.
Random House Publishing Group 2013-02-26 336 pages

The Singularity is Near When Humans Transcend Biology

Ray Kurzweil
How Singular? How singular is the Singularity? Will it happen in an instant? Lets consider again the derivation of the word. In mathematics a singularity is a value that is beyond any limit - in essence, infinity. The Singularity as we have discussed it in this book, does not achieve infinite levels of computation, memory, as any other other measurable attribute. But it certainly achieves vast levels of all these qualities, including intelligence. With the reverse engineering of the human brain we will be able to apply the parallel, self-organizing, chaotic, algorithms of human intelligence to enormously powerful computational substrates. This intelligence will then be in a position to improve its own design, both hardware and software, in a rapidly accelerating iterative process.
Viking 2005 652 pages

Doppelganger: a trip into the mirror world

Klein, Naomi
"What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired another self--a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you'd devoted your life to fighting against? Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience--she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo? Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us--and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror. Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger asks: What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now--and an intellectual adventure story for our times"--
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2023-09-12 399 pages

What Is ChatGPT Doing ... and Why Does It Work?

Stephen Wolfram
Nobody expected this-not even its creators: ChatGPT has burst onto the scene as an AI capable of writing at a convincingly human level. But how does it really work? What's going on inside its "AI mind"? In this short book, prominent scientist and computation pioneer Stephen Wolfram provides a readable and engaging explanation that draws on his decades-long unique experience at the frontiers of science and technology. Find out how the success of ChatGPT brings together the latest neural net technology with foundational questions about language and human thought posed by Aristotle more than two thousand years ago.
Repro India Limited 2023-05-24 112 pages

The Singularity Is Nearer

Kurzweil, Ray
"This successor volume to The Singularity Is Near explores how technology will refashion the human race in the decades to come. In this entirely new book, Ray Kurzweil brings a fresh perspective to advances in the singularity-assessing the progress of many of his predictions and examining the novel advancements that, in the near future, will bring a revolution in knowledge and an expansion of human potential. Among the topics he discusses are rebuilding the world atom by atom with devices like nanobots; radical life extension beyond the current age limit of 120; reinventing intelligence by expanding biological capacity with nonbiological intelligence in the cloud; how life is improving with declines in poverty and violence; and the growth of technologies that can be applied to everything from clothes to building materials to growing human organs. He also considers the potential perils of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and artificial intelligence, including such topics as how AI will impact unemployment and the safety of autonomous cars, and "After Life" technology, which will reanimate people who have passed away through a combination of data and DNA"--
Penguin USA 2025-06-03 432 pages

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now

Jaron Lanier
AS SEEN IN THE NETFLIX DOCUMENTARY THE SOCIAL DILEMMA A WIRED " ALL-TIME FAVORITE BOOK" A FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOK "THE CONSCIENCE OF SILICON VALLEY"- GQ “Profound . . . Lanier shows the tactical value of appealing to the conscience of the individual. In the face of his earnest argument, I felt a piercing shame about my own presence on Facebook. I heeded his plea and deleted my account.” - Franklin Foer, The New York Times Book Review “Mixes prophetic wisdom with a simple practicality . . . Essential reading.” - The New York Times (Summer Reading Preview) You might have trouble imagining life without your social media accounts, but virtual reality pioneer Jaron Lanier insists that we’re better off without them. In Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now , Lanier, who participates in no social media, offers powerful and personal reasons for all of us to leave these dangerous online platforms. Lanier’s reasons for freeing ourselves from social media’s poisonous grip include its tendency to bring out the worst in us, to make politics terrifying, to trick us with illusions of popularity and success, to twist our relationship with the truth, to disconnect us from other people even as we are more “connected” than ever, to rob us of our free will with relentless targeted ads. How can we remain autonomous in a world where we are under continual surveillance and are constantly being prodded by algorithms run by some of the richest corporations in history that have no way of making money other than being paid to manipulate our behavior? How could the benefits of social media possibly outweigh the catastrophic losses to our personal dignity, happiness, and freedom? Lanier remains a tech optimist, so while demonstrating the evil that rules social media business models today, he also envisions a humanistic setting for social networking that can direct us toward a richer and fuller way of living and connecting with our world.
Picador 2019-08-27 176 pages

Distributed systems

Steen, Maarten van,Tanenbaum, Andrew S.
This is the fourth edition of "Distributed Systems." We have stayed close to the setup of the third edition, including examples of (part of) existing distributed systems close to where general principles are discussed. For example, we have included material on blockchain systems, and discuss their various components throughout the book. We have, again, used special boxed sections for material that can be skipped at first reading. The text has been thoroughly reviewed, revised, and updated. In particular, all the Python code has been updated to Python3, while at the same time the channel package has been almost completely revised and simplified. Additional material, including coding examples, figures, and slides, are available at www.distributed-systems.net.
Maarten van Steen 2025 669 pages

Sm Computer Networks S/M

Andrew S. Tanenbaum
This is the long-awaited 3rd Edition of Tanenbaum's classic book on computer networking. The finest network engineer I know (who was stolen from my previous employer by developers of IPv6) swears by this book, and it is arguably the best single resource for gaining a good technical understanding of modern networking in the mid 1990s. Very Highly Recommended.
Pearson Professional Education 1988-08-01 55 pages

Programming in Lua

Ierusalimschy, Roberto
Lua is spreading more and more throughout different areas of software, from embedded systems and mobile devices to the Web and the Internet of Things. Besides, it has a major role in the game industry, where knowledge of Lua has become an indisputable asset. Lua is the language of choice for anyone who needs a scripting language that is simple, efficient, extensible, portable, and free. Programming in Lua is the official book about the language, providing a solid base to any programmer who wants to use Lua. Authored by Roberto Ierusalimschy, the chief architect of the language, it covers all aspects of Lua 5---from the basics to its API with C. The book is the main source of programming patterns for Lua, with numerous code examples that help the reader to make the most of Lua's flexibility and powerful mechanisms. Programming in Lua is targeted at people with some programming background, but does not assume any prior knowledge about Lua or other scripting languages. This Fourth Edition updates the book to Lua 5.3 and marks a complete reorganization of the text. Building on his many years of experience teaching Lua, Roberto has restructured the book to present the material in a growing order of complexity, allowing the reader to better absorb the character of the language.
Lua.org 2016 369 pages

Hackers

Levy, Steven
This 25th anniversary edition of Steven Levy's classic book traces the exploits of the computer revolution's original hackers -- those brilliant and eccentric nerds from the late 1950s through the early '80s who took risks, bent the rules, and pushed the world in a radical new direction. With updated material from noteworthy hackers such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, Richard Stallman, and Steve Wozniak, Hackers is a fascinating story that begins in early computer research labs and leads to the first home computers. Levy profiles the imaginative brainiacs who found clever and unorthodox solutions to computer engineering problems. They had a shared sense of values, known as "the hacker ethic," that still thrives today. Hackers captures a seminal period in recent history when underground activities blazed a trail for today's digital world, from MIT students finagling access to clunky computer-card machines to the DIY culture that spawned the Altair and the Apple II.
O'Reilly Media 2010-06-29 499 pages

Genesis: artificial intelligence, hope, and the human spirit

Kissinger, Henry,Mundie, Craig,Schmidt, Eric,Runde, Eleanor
"As it absorbs data, gains agency, and intermediates between humans and reality, AI (artificial intelligence) will help us to address enormous crises, from climate change to geopolitical conflicts to income inequality. It might well solve some of the greatest mysteries of our universe and elevate the human spirit to unimaginable heights. But it will also pose challenges on a scale and of an intensity that we have never seen--usurping our power of independent judgment and action, testing our relationship with the divine, and perhaps even spurring a new phase in human evolution. The last book of elder statesman Henry Kissinger, written with technologists Craig Mundie and Eric Schmidt, 'Genesis' charts a course between blind faith and unjustified fear as it outlines an effective strategy for navigating the age of AI."--
Little, Brown and Company 2024-11-19 249 pages