THE PERFECT GIFT - Whether you love the computer world the way it is, or consider it a nightmare honkytonk prison, you'll giggle and rage at Ted Nelson's telling of computer history, its personalities and infights. Computer movies, music, 3D; the eternal fight between Jobs and Gates; the tangled stories of the Internet and the World Wide Web; all these and more are punchily told in brief chapters on many topics such as The Web Browser Salad, Voting Machines, Google, Web 2.0 and much more. These short stories make great reading - it's a book to dip in and out of. You'll find answers to such questions as # Why do alphabets have upper case, why not numbers? # Why does everything have to be hierarchical on computers? That's not how *my* projects are organized! Where did WYSIWYG come from? The answer will surprise you. Plus, you'll find out why the author, a well-known computer veteran, hopes it can all become much better.
Technology has disrupted the news industry--its relationships, forms, and business models--but also provides no end of opportunities for improving, expanding, reimagining, and sustaining journalism.
Paranormal Dating Agency Book 2 - STANDALONEA BBW in search of love + A sexy shifter who secretly loved her = Smokin' Roaring RomanceNita Islas wants to find love. She's tired of the superficial relationships and is ready to give true romance a try. She uses the Paranormal Dating Agency and hopes they can help her where all others have failed. What she didn't expect was to find her date flat on his back in nothing more than a towel.Ky Stone has been in love with curvy and funny Nita since they were in High School. When she moved away, she took his heart with her. Then one day Ky wakes up to find her leaning over him. He's sure he's died and gone to heaven. He has no idea what she's doing there, but he's sure as hell not letting her leave.Fate, meddling family and the PDA have brought them together again. The chemistry between them is explosive. But there's problems with Ky's neighboring clan and he's keeping secrets from Nita. He needs to find a way to open up to her or lies and unexpected danger could tear them apart...forever.Reader Warning: This book contains lots of scorching sex (dirty dirty dirty sex), adult language (hanky panky with no dirty talk is no fun), and violence. If this is not the kind of stuff you like to read, skip this book. However, if you like dirty, raunchy sex with a hot bear on one curvy sarcastic girl, then this is right up your alley. Enjoy!
An “entertaining and profoundly original” (San Francisco Chronicle) moving and hilarious tale of two friends who fly around the world trying to give away a lot of money and free themselves from a profound loss. • From the bestselling author of The Circle. “Nobody writes better than Dave Eggers about young men who aspire to be, at the same time, authentic and sincere.” —The New York Times Book Review "You Shall Know Our Velocity! is the work of a wildly talented writer.... Like Kerouac's book, Eggers's could inspire a generation as much as it documents it." —LA Weekly
Yes, it’s true: you can learn how to be a verbal wizard! Ever hear someone utter an unforgettable phrase and feel yourself reacting with with…well, awe? Ever read a great quote and think I could never come up with anything that clever? Daunting as it may seem, there’s nothing mystical about witcraft. Crafting memorable lines doesn’t require DNA-encoded brilliance. What it does require is some knowledge of the tricks and techniques that make words stick. In Word Hero, Jay Heinrichs rescues the how-to of verbal artistry from cobwebbed textbooks and makes it entirely fresh– even a little mischievous. Fear not: on offer here are not dry, abstract ideas couched in academic jargon. Rather, Heinrichs takes you on an amusing – and amazingly helpful – tour of the mechanisms that make powerful language work. You’ll learn how to slyly plant your words in people’s heads and draw indelible verbal pictures by employing such tools as “crashing symbols,” “rapid repeaters,” “Russian Dolls” and even the powers of Mr. Potato Head. With those tools and others tucked in your utility belt, you might not immediately achieve “wordsmith immortality” but you will become a better speaker, writer, and raconteur…and long after people have forgotten everything else, they’ll remember your priceless lines.
In a book that’s one part prophecy, one part thought experiment, one part manifesto, and one part survival manual, internet impresario and blogging pioneer Jeff Jarvis reverse-engineers Google, the fastest-growing company in history, to discover forty clear and straightforward rules to manage and live by. At the same time, he illuminates the new worldview of the internet generation: how it challenges and destroys—but also opens up—vast new opportunities. His findings are counterintuitive, imaginative, practical, and above all visionary, giving readers a glimpse of how everyone and everything—from corporations to governments, nations to individuals—must evolve in the Google era. What Would Google Do? is an astonishing, mind-opening book that, in the end, is not about Google. It’s about you.
“Innovation” is the hottest buzzword in business. But what if our obsession with finding the next big thing has distracted us from the work that matters most? “The most important book I’ve read in a long time . . . It explains so much about what is wrong with our technology, our economy, and the world, and gives a simple recipe for how to fix it: Focus on understanding what it takes for your products and services to last.”—Tim O’Reilly, founder of O’Reilly Media It’s hard to avoid innovation these days. Nearly every product gets marketed as being disruptive, whether it’s genuinely a new invention or just a new toothbrush. But in this manifesto on thestate of American work, historians of technology Lee Vinsel and Andrew L. Russell argue that our way of thinking about and pursuing innovation has made us poorer, less safe, and—ironically—less innovative. Drawing on years of original research and reporting, The Innovation Delusion shows how the ideology of change for its own sake has proved a disaster. Corporations have spent millions hiring chief innovation officers while their core businesses tank. Computer science programs have drilled their students on programming and design, even though theoverwhelming majority of jobs are in IT and maintenance. In countless cities, suburban sprawl has left local governments with loads of deferred repairs that they can’t afford to fix. And sometimes innovation even kills—like in 2018 when a Miami bridge hailed for its innovative design collapsed onto a highway and killed six people. In this provocative, deeply researched book, Vinsel and Russell tell the story of how we devalued the work that underpins modern life—and, in doing so, wrecked our economy and public infrastructure while lining the pockets of consultants who combine the ego of Silicon Valley with the worst of Wall Street’s greed. The authors offer a compelling plan for how we can shift our focus away from the pursuit of growth at all costs, and back toward neglected activities like maintenance, care, and upkeep. For anyone concerned by the crumbling state of our roads and bridges or the direction our economy is headed, The Innovation Delusion is a deeply necessary reevaluation of a trend we can still disrupt.
In the spirit of the mega-selling On Bullshit, philosopher Aaron James presents a theory of the asshole that is both intellectually provocative and existentially necessary. What does it mean for someone to be an asshole? The answer is not obvious, despite the fact that we are often personally stuck dealing with people for whom there is no better name. Try as we might to avoid them, assholes are found everywhere—at work, at home, on the road, and in the public sphere. Encountering one causes great difficulty and personal strain, especially because we often cannot understand why exactly someone should be acting like that. Asshole management begins with asshole understanding. Much as Machiavelli illuminated political strategy for princes, this book finally gives us the concepts to think or say why assholes disturb us so, and explains why such people seem part of the human social condition, especially in an age of raging narcissism and unbridled capitalism. These concepts are also practically useful, as understanding the asshole we are stuck with helps us think constructively about how to handle problems he (and they are mostly all men) presents. We get a better sense of when the asshole is best resisted, and when he is best ignored—a better sense of what is, and what is not, worth fighting for.
The business of journalism has an extensive, storied, and often romanticized history. Newspaper reporting has long shaped the way that we see the world, played key roles in exposing scandals, and has even been alleged to influence international policy. The past several years have seen the newspaper industry in a state of crisis, with Twitter and Facebook ushering in the rise of citizen journalism and a deprofessionalization of the industry, plummeting readership and revenue, and municipal and regional papers shuttering or being absorbed into corporate behemoths. Now billionaires, most with no journalism experience but lots of power and strong views, are stepping in to purchase newspapers, both large and small. This addition to the What Everyone Needs to Know® series looks at the past, present and future of journalism, considering how the development of the industry has shaped the present and how we can expect the future to roll out. It addresses a wide range of questions, from whether objectivity was only a conceit of late twentieth century reporting, largely behind us now; how digital technology has disrupted journalism; whether newspapers are already dead to the role of non-profit journalism; the meaning of "transparency" in reporting; the way that private interests and governments have created their own advocacy journalism; whether social media is changing journalism; the new social rules of old media outlets; how franchised media is addressing the problem of disappearing local papers; and the rise of citizen journalism and hacker journalism. It will even look at the ways in which new technologies potentially threaten to replace journalists.
"Here is the journal which ultimately proved the motive force for The Magnificent Obsession, the journal as it was set down by Doctor Hudson himself. One feels that he must have been a real person (or that at any rate, in his fictional being he represented the personification of someone’s experience and thought). Here we learn whence came the power—the inner strength through which he built spiritual, physical and worldly success. Here we trace the various experiments which proved his own theory. And here too we follow his opinion on a world facing much of what our world is facing today. This gives the book not only the customary hypodermic that Doctor Douglas so ably administers, but a timeliness that is not to be ignored. There is no one writing today who can put more punch into a sermon—without making one conscious it is a sermon." —Kirkus Review Lloyd C. Douglas was an American minister and author born in Indiana in 1877. He was married and had two children. He did not write his first novel until the age of 50 but was considered to be one of the most popular writers of his time. His works usually had a moral and religious tone. Two of his best known works were The Robe and The Big Fisherman, which were made into major motion pictures. The Robe, written in 1942, sold over two million copies in hardcover alone. It held the number one position on the New York Times Best Seller list for over a year and remained on the list for an additional two years. The film version of The Robe hit the screen in 1953 and starred Richard Burton.
